Learning Alliances

The mechanics are in place, now for the fun part. I’ve been working on setting up a feed for CPsquare members’ blogs. I just checked it to see whether the feed was working correctly, and it was really spectacular! What an amazing bunch of people and work going on!

Of course for the feed to come into existence in the first place required discussions back and forth between Beverly, Andy, and many others inside and outside of CPsquare. And there has been plenty of conversation back and forth all along. For example, Beth Kanter summarizes Nancy White’s links on the subject of blogs for communities.

There is so much diversity that I can’t begin to describe it! The big question is whether the collective noun should be a feed of bloggers or a term that evokes community somewhat. We shall see. To me it’s a reminder of the fact that any new technology like this is another window into a large community that interacts on so many platforms and in so many different ways, face-to-face, by email, by phone, by instant message, on a web board, and now more and more via their blogs.

A participant from a recent Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop, who works in a university, writes:

I am spending more and more time reading and learning about CoP’s and am finding the amount of information to be monumental. As a relative newbie to CoP’s, I’m wondering if you have a recommendation for how to approach the literature in an organized manner. In other words, if you were a beginning “CoP’er” how would you prioritize what to read?

I thought I’d respond here, since it’s a question that comes up fairly often. I think the answer depends a lot on who you are and what your intentions or needs are. You need to answer the question, “In what context are you working?” As my friend Bronwyn Stuckey muses, when you start studying communities of practice, disciplinary boundaries tend to melt away, and you find yourself reading stuff that you never imagined before.

One implication of how the community of practice idea pops up all over the place is that a lot of things you’ve already read are quite relevant. So when you read new stuff (possibly using this map: http://cofpractice-biblio.wikispaces.com/ ) don’t forget that you are already an expert in certain areas and you should make it a practice of noting things there. I guess I would suggest that you check these out as foundational:

• Classics and foundational materials (Lave and Chaiklin is especially good, I think)
• Learning and learning theory

But then be sure and look at specific cases, say about Education (where Barab, Kling and Gray should be early on your list), so that practice is your guide. I have to say that 8 years ago, when I got involved in communities of practice, I had the fantasy that I would read everything on the subject. It didn’t take long to realize that that would never be. (I just looked at the bibliography page http://cofpractice-biblio.wikispaces.com/bibliographies and saw more stuff that I’d like to read.) Therefore, I suggest taking a practitioner’s approach, listen in on the conversations at CPsquare or com-prac.

I’ve always thought that technology can boost communities of practice, but almost every tool also creates new boundaries around a community and more complexity for community members. Learning to manage those boundaries is a really important topic for community members, leaders, and sponsors. I’ve been learning a lot about how to create a wider periphery for CPsquare in the last few weeks.

Beverly Traynor started it or picked up on it, I forget. There’s been a good discussion in CPsquare about what the purpose of such an aggregated blog feed might be and how several variants might be useful. The basic idea is to give people who are not members of the community a sense of what bloggers who are members of CPsquare are writing about. It’s amusing that in our conversations about the design of boundaries, a couple of people have mentioned that it seems appropriate to them that CPsquare has a public, no-cost forum called com-prac. In fact the com-prac discussion began in October of 1999, and CPsquare in its current form didn’t get going until January of 2003. Of course, I think of com-prac and CPsquare as very related and encourage everyone who joins CPsquare to subscribe to com-prac. But the consequence of more platforms (Web Crossing, Yahoo Groups, blogs, etc., etc.) is more complexity and that can make on-boarding and orientation of new community members more difficult.

Anyway, my dive into RSS feed aggregation has been time-consuming and has felt like I’m swimming through an swamp of uncertain possibilities and constraints. Finally, last week I decided that I was going to stop experimenting, even though I had a working prototype. I felt like I was considering too many untested angles and considerations at once, so I needed to talk to an expert.

Fortunately for me and for CPsquare, we have a friend in Marshall Kirkpatrick, currently blogging furiously for TechCrunch. Last night we talked for two and a half hours over a pint and a half of Portland’s best brew. Rich conversations with people like Marshall always have an upside and a downside. The upside in this case was:

• I have a lot more context about the design and management of RSS feeds. I decided that if Marshall said something was inherently confusing or problematic, I’ll take it as conclusive for the time being and give myself a break.
• He agreed that the model I’d put together of the CPsquare registration and feed creation process was reasonable and do-able. My general direction made sense. Now to put it in production (after just a few more experiments).
• His thinking about the possibilities, of course, was way beyond what I’d thought of so far. I don’t think I want to let myself think about those possibilities till there’s more time to dig into them.
• Maybe the greatest benefit for me was looking over his shoulder and seeing how he used a tools like Diigo, Zaptxt, and gmail together. Wow.

The downside:

• He mentioned a bunch of other tools that I will need to investigate.
  (Of course this is good news, but comes with a cost–more time digging around)
• I’ve already been shopping at Amazon and registered at several more sites and downloaded more Firefox extensions and the morning is only half over. (Yes, it has an up-side, but it takes a lot of time!)

Often a tool’s utility for a community of practice is affected by how it works with other tools as much as how it works by itself. I used to think of phone bridges as free-standing tools, but I’ve come to think of them as a key community resources that needs to fit into a constellation of tools. Thinking about how tools fit with each other adds a layer of complexity but it also gets you closer to helping your community really connect.

Sometimes a tool has features that overlap the functionality of other tools, so that those features are less significant than they would otherwise be, depending on what other tools a community uses. For example, most distributed communities have some kind of email list for getting the word out. That email list performs many functions, including sending out announcements that the community is meeting on a phone bridge. Therefore phone bridge features to announce a conference call are not so useful, even though they may be designed really well. For example, http://www.freeconference.com/ has an elegant conference call email message that includes an easy way to plop an appointment right into your calendar. It’s cool but its overlap with other community tools makes it less relevant in many cases.

A report on a phone conference duration and participation, however, is an essential function that a phone bridge alone can provide. This is an example where my current favorite, http://www.highspeedconferencing.com/, doesn’t do so well. When you’ve finished a phone conference on High Speed Conferencing, you get a thank-you email that links you back to their website, allowing you to schedule the next conference call (and send out another email invitation for it). A much more useful approach is the report that you get from http://freeconferencecall.com/, which lists each connection, the call date, calling number, start time, end time, and total minutes . Although occasionally the calling number is not available, it usually including the country code of the person calling (like most such tools, it’s US-centric in that “no country code” means that the call came from within the US). It’s essentially the information that High Speed Conferencing provides in its real-time conference call control page. Often there’s so much going on when I’m organizing a community meeting, that I don’t have time to worry about who’s there or not, who dropped off the call early, who got there late, etc. It’s really helpful to have a record for later on — to track participation, whether you’re interested in who’s coming to the meetings or who or what brings people to them.

A phone bridge email report could have a lot of additional functionality built into it. Some ideas that come to mind:

• Make the phone numbers clickable — going directly to Skype
• Provide the data in a form that you can insert it into a database (you might want to translate phone numbers into email addresses or names)
• Link directly to the conference call audio recording (which you’ll want to send to community members who did not attend the call, for example)

I imagine there will be a lot of growth in this area as phone conferencing becomes more and more Internet-based.

I listened to Jerry Michalski’s Yi-Tan call (http://www.yi-tan.com) yesterday. It’s a weekly call about technology and its social consequences. People on the call wouldn’t call it a community of practice, but if you notice, a lot of people on the call are “regulars” that know each other, share in-jokes, can often finish each other’s sentences, and definitely share a learning agenda. But there are drop-ins who don’t know the ropes, so it takes a lot of skill to run.

Jerry does a super job of producing a high-value, 35 minute phone call that focuses on one subject at a time, involves a presentation by one or more guests, and ends with an awesome summary of what was said to wrap it all up. He uses the FreeConference.com phone bridge (with the 800-number that’s free-to-the-caller, since most of the people are from the US). The group always uses an IRC back-channel. I’ve been observing how the back-channel fits with the phone conversation, which is always recorded and pod-cast afterwards, but will write about that some other time.

A lot of little details catch my attention each time. Jerry’s group uses the technology really well, but I often think that the phone bridge could be designed to make less coping necessary.

• At the beginning of the call, Jerry always reminds people not to put the call on hold. But every few calls, someone forgets and puts us all on hold, so the whole group is subjected to some inane hold music. Since the person has put the call on hold isn’t listening, they don’t know they’re irritating the rest of us and we almost never find out who the culprit was. Sometimes the music is very loud so its really a problem, but this week it was pretty soft and the several speakers could just raise their voices and speak over the music. It would be nice if a phone bridge could just start with everyone on mute (allowing people to un-mute whenever they want) or to have a web page control panel (like the one that High Speed Conferencing has) that could mute everyone when necessary or mute everyone but a known individual or two. High Speed Conferencing has the buttons to do that, but they haven’t worked for me.

• A nice feature of FreeConference.com that Jerry uses is the bridge-based recording. When you phone the bridge and enter a pass-code, the bridge tells you that the call is being recorded and you give your permission by pressing “1″ on your phone keypad before the bridge lets you into the conference. That saves the call’s host from having to ask people’s permission (or, more accurately, remind them of the fact that it’s being recorded).
• As the phone bridge is about to connect you to the group conversation, it says, “Please introduce yourself.” That’s a useful reminder to be polite, but it leads people to do so even after the call has been going on for a while. Jerry could remind people to not introduce themselves after a certain point in time when he sends out the call’s agenda. Or the phone bridge control panel could have a button that changes the message, “This call has already started, please do not introduce yourself unless called upon.” Wouldn’t that be nice?

Recently I’ve been using a phone bridge that connects both Skype and regular phone users. It’s called High Speed Conferencing and it’s free. There are many free phone bridges out there these days, but having Skype and regular phone users on the same call is very helpful, especially for international communities. In general, the sound quality on this bridge has been excellent. I’ve held several successful community meetings on it, although yesterday we did have some problems with sound quality. The bridge has several usability features that don’t quite work as they should or could be improved a lot.

There are several nice features: you can dial into a local number in the US, the UK, France or Germany. To connect with Skype, you enter a pseudo-phone number, which connects you directly to an individual conference room. With the phone number, a caller needs to enter a conference room number. (Other phone bridges require you to enter a conference ID with your keypad, and that can be actually be impossible in some cases.)
There is an email scheduling feature, which may or may not be useful. For Skype users, all they need to do is click on a link and you’re automatically connected to your conference. The community events I’ve organized have a mix of people: some I know will be on the call and some who might or might not join the call. Most communities have some standard way of sending out an invitation that they’d rather use.
The web control panel is useful but could be better. It’s great to see who’s on the call, although it can be difficult to figure out who’s who for non-Skype participants. I couldn’t get the auto-refresh to work, so I kept having to hit the refresh myself. In addition, I couldn’t get the mute all users button to work, nor could I mute individuial users. I wonder whether that had anything to do with the fact that there was more than one person logged on as a moderator? (Anticipating the need to have more than one person talk in “lecture-mode,” assuming that there might be noise that we’d want to mute out.)
In general the sound quality on this bridge has been really good. I’ve had one call where we had a bad experience. Here’s a recording of a 10 second snippet in the middle of the call where we were hearing a lot of noise. The noise was intermittent but quite irritating during certain parts of an hour-and-a-half meeting. Trying to use the mute button didn’t work.

Extras. There are two “extras” on the High Speed Conferencing website, a speakerphone and software to record phone calls with Skype. On all of the calls I’ve organized on this phone bridge, I’ve always done the recording over the regular phone line, assuming that the Skype alternative has to pay a VoIP quality penalty. I’ll try both at the same time to make a comparison!

Recommendation: this is the best free phone bridge I’ve seen.

At 4:37 AM Sydney time, Shawn sends me a message on Skype chat:

Shawn: Hi John
Shawn: When I call the Skype conf call number there are people talking in another language. Is this a timeshare arrangement?
John: yikes!

Somehow, I imagine the worst! We have vandals taking over our telephone bridge! Is the new bridge defective, mixing up different conversations? I quickly call in and find Shawn on the bridge, chatting happily with Susanne Nyrop and her guest (they were also there early because they were a little anxious to make sure the technology was working; since they had thought they were the only ones on the bridge, naturally they were speaking Danish.) It turned out that Shawn and Susanne were both playing a leadership role and had met and done some coordination via chat, but Shawn didn’t recognize Susanne’s voice until after he’d left me that scarry instant message

I think there are several interesting points about this annecdote:

• Communities depend on the passion and generosity of people who are willing to get up out of bed at outrageous times so as to be ready to facilitate a call that’s convient for others in the community! And on people who are willing to deal with new infrastructure and are willing to show up with their friends to make sure they’re able to connect. Wow.

• It’s really important for someone to show up early for community calls. There are enough glitches that turn up at the last minute, so having someone there to help can make a big difference. So leaders need to be more than punctual: they need to be there before anybody else arrives! I guess 18 minutes is a bit extreme, unless it’s a really important meeting.

• It’s really important to have a back-channel, so that when something seems wrong, people who are producing the event can communicate easily and instantaneously. There’s no time for looking up someone’s IM handle at the last minute.

• None of the technologies that we use to interact in a community give us a complete image of each other: we can become familiar with someone’s style in a chat and then respond to them as if they were a stranger