Learning Alliances

Last week was the fall vacation for universities in Denmark, so their facilities were used for conferences such as AoIR 9.0 and EPIC 2008.  Many of the people who participated in either conference did not seem to know about the other one, even though to me there were many connections and overlaps. There was a big contingent from CPsquare traveling to Denmark, mostly to AoIR.

Outside the EPIC Conference in Copenhagen
Originally uploaded by xeeliz

Beverly Trayner and I had been corresponding with Gitti Jordan about a CPsquare-sponsored dialog on Sunday October 19, so to get the conversation going we snuck into the EPIC conference to join a workshop she was leading on Mobile Work and Mobile Lives. After we’d looked around to determine whether we could get in, we had a coffee waiting for the conference attendees to finish lunch and talked about billing rates and business models.

Once we had begged to be admitted and had sat down to talk with people, we were surprised and delighted at how welcomed we felt and we both ended up being the reporters for our respective discussion groups. Here’s roughly what I reported on for one of the three groups:

1. Looking at issues such as worker and work mobility, work at a distance and with distant partners as daily practices:
   • We tend to frame these questions at an individual level, at the risk of missing opportunities and problems at the ensemble level.
   • Collaborating and living with people at a distance, across many time zones now seems to be the norm, but it’s also a challenge we can’t quite handle or necessarily understand.
   • We need to look at implications both for “the workplace” as well as for “the home.”
2. Big themes for mobile workers who collaborate at a distance:
   • What does it mean to have roots? Where is home?
   • Is multi-location, multi-time zone work liberating or enslaving?
   • How bound up is our thinking about these issues with our own social status, seeing all these issues as pertaining mainly to “knowledge workers”?
   • Is the germination of powerful ideas still necessarily a co-located, face-to-face event?
   • How can we be so obsessed with purposeful research while relying on serendipitous encounters and surprising discoveries?
   • Can we “stand outside” somehow to understand the importance of “where we live” physically and in terms of the succession of generations?
3. There were all kinds of issues on the edge of our awareness, that fell into two main areas:
   • How can we “study” these phenomena? What is “observation” (can we do it at a distance)? What kinds of scale issues are there?
   • What would the value of insights into these issues be (were we to understand them)?

It was really fun!

Gene Smith observes in his book on Tagging that Cialdini’s idea of “social proof” explains a lot about why social tagging is useful.  Smith’s book is full of insights and suggestions for software designers, but also seems very useful from a tech steward’s perspective.  And “social proof” is one of the reasons that communities of practice are so powerful for spreading practice (whether good or bad, whether about technology or not).  Among other things seeing that others in your community are paying attention to something is proof that it’s important.

A few weekends ago I helped design an event that brought together volunteer administrators from Shambhala Centers in the Northwest region.  I had pushed for the idea that the whole day should be focused on sharing administrative, financial, instructional, or technology practices.  It was a great day.

But during afternon the report-outs it was surprising how the people who were in sessions focusing on fund-raising or leadership or schedule coordination had so much more enthusiasm for using technology to do their work than the people we had brought together to talk about technology as such.  I think we didn’t provide enough social proof that technology was relevant to the functioning of a little meditation community.

I’m posting this here because CPsquare’s blogs are broken (soon to be moved & updated).

CPsquare book club: We’ll be reading selected chapters from Communities of Practice: Creating Learning Environments for Educators, edited by Chris Kimble, Paul Hildreth, and Isabelle Bourdon. See the table of contents for both volumes. Several of the authors are members or have been involved in CPsquare over the years. All of the authors will be invited to participate in the discussions. Some synchronous events (teleconferences) will be held, but most of the discussion will be asynchronous. If you want to participate in these discussions you should buy the book immediately. Selection of which chapters to read together will begin late July. Actual chapter discussions begin a week later. It’s free to CPsquare members and $50 for non-members. Registration is at: http://www.cpsquare.org/events/index.htm (shouldn’t you really just join?)

We’re beginning a year-long series of monthly visits about multi-membership and bridging across communities with Davee Evans who straddles two communities of practice: the Wikipedia editors community and the Shambhala meditation community. Our first session with Davee will be on Wednesday, July 9, 2008 at 20:00

Karen Guldberg and Jenny Mackness have done a raft of interviews with participants and leaders of the Winter 2008 Foundations Workshop and have written a paper about it, getting at issues such as emotion, connectivity, understanding norms, learning tensions/dualities, technology, and identity. We’re scheduling a session in September where previous participants and CPsquare members will be invited to talk about these findings and their implications and application.

The next Foundations Workshop starts on September 15: http://cpsquare.org/edu/foundations

Our first offering of CPsquare’s “Connected Futures” workshop, about new technologies for communities was very exhilarating, although exhausting for both participants and leaders. We used Twitter, Skype, blogs, wikis, Facebook, social bookmarking, and Web Crossing. It was challenging to keep track of each other but we managed to. We all got a lot out of the experience and we’re intending to offer it again in later this year, after the Foundations Workshop. http://www.cpsquare.org/edu/CP2tech/

Woke up thinking about all that could be done — and that had to be done today.

Before walking the dog, at 6:15 am, I went through the previous night’s email on Outlook, looked at my schedule and made some plans:

• A workshop payment mix-up (money going to a personal Paypal account rather than the CPsquare account) has been fixed. Still 2 transactions to resolve.
• Got the draft of a contract with a government agency. Need to print and send back.
• Ward agreed to write a blurb for the book! Yay! Sent him the 4 MB file right away.
• Got the glossary edits from Peter + Trudy — they look great! Need to respond to their extensive annotations.
• Got plenty of SPAM.
• Jotted a short-to-do list on my composition notebook: send “thank-yous” to the several people who helped during the talk I gave last night at ODN, post the slides on slideshare.

After walking the dog, got to my office around 7:45 am.

• The alert that daughter Liza had logged on to Yahoo IM shows up. I didn’t ping her because I was so busy. When she was with Peace Brigades International in Colombia I always tried to wave, but now that she’s back in the US I don’t bother her as much.
• Had a Skype call with Patricia and Beverly who are spending the day together in Hamburg! At the last minute, we use a Skype chat to move our meeting time forward an hour. Because they were in the same room, we met with Skype Video and took a few snapshots for fun. We talked shop, about books we’re reading, strategies for marketing and survival. We eventually get focused on writing and the deadline. We decide that in alignment with the autoethnographic approach in our paper, the literature review should also be “personal,” focusing on our experience of the literature rather than arguing that we’ve read everything that’s relevant. We decided that June 12 was the “snapshot day” for our autoethnographic vignettes. (Hence, this post, a departure from my habit of reticence.) After the call I find that we had two chat windows going (one with Patricia alone which had most of our notes and another with both Patricia and Beverly, which had some notes from early on) so I pasted them together, interleaving lines using the time stamps. I got the chat transcript in the mail by mid-afternoon.
• Got a phone call from Doug. Thanked him for taking care of the dog while I gave the talk at ODN last night. We talked about sending an email messages to the Portland Shambhala sangha about the building purchase. He needed a phone number, so I mailed him an out-of-date phone list for the community.
• Had a scheduled half hour phone meeting with Rebecka. Send text. Worked on the 2nd draft in Writeboard of a 3-day session for next fall.
• Got an email anticipating Trudy’s surgery.
• Scanned the emails about an effort by the Yi-Tan Guild to document our own teleconference set-up, facilitation, and follow-up procedures. We’ve been using Iotum’s Calliflower tool on Facebook, but it still needs a wiki page to remind ourselves how to do things.
• Exchanged several emails with Naava’s assistant to schedule a meeting with Naava the next day.
• Exchanged IMs with Lauren re: lost password on CPsquare that I’d forgotten to send her, method for avoiding a lost password, scheduling a conference call with 3 community leaders from her company about scope and leadership strategies.
• IMs with wife Nancy who was bragging about her new 22″ monintor. Compared lunch plans, discussed the after-work schedule, grocery pick-up items, and a little blister on her foot. Finished just in time for my noon meeting.
• Had an hour-long teleconference with Debra and four others on her staff (who were together on a speakerphone) about the evaluation report we had just written on the experience of community members in a face-to-face meeting they’d organized. They asked for an overview of the report, although I’d sent it to them a week before. I talked at length — ended up giving a mini-lecture! Recorded it for Louis (partner for this project in DC), but forgot to turn the recording off, so will have to edit!
• At lunch I continue reading Grant McCracken’s “Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture” on the kitchen counter over some warmed-up leftovers. The book has a lot to do with culture and identity construction. I wonder, am I in the business of helping people create new homes for new identities? Today’s snippet gave me some insight into sports and American males that I’d never quite understood (having grown up in Puerto Rico) on p 283:
  

  “As overmighty subjects, they have their own performative powers. A preteen on a basketball court takes possession of the voice-over that belongs to the sports announcer and the color commentator. He uses this to take possession of the pretext, the script, the accomplishment, and the admiration that belong to a celebrity athlete. This is what, in basketball, they call a steal. The preteen has intercepted powers that belong to the meaning makers. It is endemic hubris, a matter-of-fact appropriation of superordinate powers by a subordinate party. The twelve-year-old makes Larry Bird a god and himself Larry Bird. Such subjects are overmighty and increasingly common.”

• Retrieved and formatted the chat transcript for yesterday’s Winter 2008 workshop group “reunion” meeting from Web Crossing. Retrieved the audio recording from the phone bridge, saved it, and put a link to it together with the chat room notes in an email to the whole group.
• The postman dropped off a copy of Groundswell, a book that Shirley read and recommended and that has an amazing publicity machine behind it.
• Finally made some progress with my idea of using screen captures to create a diagram about platform integration and compatibility for our book on Technology Stewardship for Communities. Put five different screen-shots into one diagram with enough room for a lot of annotations and sent it to Etienne. This has been the most troubling diagram in the book.
• Ended the day editing a summary of Marc’s book. His ideas are great and now are starting to emerge from a murky translation.

Sources:

• Outlook - various folders [Inbox, sent messages, project folder]
• Skype history
• Paper notebook (log)
• Trillian history function
• RescueTime

Notice that RescueTime misses the hour-long conversation with Debra et al.

Although I’m still inching my way through Geoffrey Bowker’s “Memory practices in the sciences”, I’ve been sneaking peeks into Charles L. Briggs, Learning How to Ask; A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in Social Science Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). This little statement stood out loud and clear:

Interview techniques smuggle outmoded preconceptions out of the realm of conscious theory and into that of methodology.

I keep suspecting that interviewing leaders or members of communities of practice is useful but is also very problematic. Making friends over a much longer term might be more reliable, although it takes much more time and brings up lots of other questions about who learns what from whom.

Shirley Williams and I heard about the book at the same time, but she read it right away and I’m still wending my way through it.

Andy Mulholland, Chris S. Thomas, Paul Kurchina with Dan Woods, Mashup Corporations; the End of Business as Usual; A chronicle of Service-Oriented Business Transformation (New York, NY: Evolved Media Network, 2006). A lot of the issues in the book revolve around the business opportunities that result from reducing some of the barriers that are embedded in traditional IT — between departments and between the “inside” and “outside” of an organization. Here’s what I think is their key diagram (with my annotations in red):

XML and service oriented architectures, according to the authors, now allow organizations to bridge across all of those boundaries. Data can flow and so can value. The organization opens up and allows an ecosystem of value creation to form around the services it provides. And that process requires that “shadow IT” be recognized as a valuable contribution to the organization’s functioning.

It’s all told in an engaging story about a company that sells pop corn poppers. The characters have humorous names like CEO Jane Moneymaker, Marketing Manager Hugo Wunderkind, and CIO Josh Lovecraft.

It seems to me that it’s communities of practice (CoP) that make sense of boundaries, whether within a company, on the boundary and outside the company. The technologies by themselves won’t do it and the authors recognize that (if only to comment on the fact that “online communities need to be kept under control”). There’s no mention of the semi-formal technology stewardship that bridges between formal IT, shadow IT, the formal organization, and informal communities of practice. Now it may be that the communities that form in such a company using Web 2.0 technologies are less cohesive or more dispersed than those we see in gated communities (somehow they “look different” than what we’ve recognized), but communities have a critical role to play.

A very good book! You should read it, too!

Lilia Efimova and Nancy White were talking about some of the ideas in our technology for communities project and Lilia comments on how “community” seems like a problematic term to some people because it’s ambiguous - it gets used in many different ways and at different scales.

I like the argument that King and Frost make that ambiguity has many uses in practice and that dis-ambiguation is a bit over-rated (John Leslie King and Robert L. Frost, “Managing Distance over Time: The Evolution of Technologies of Dis/Ambiguation” in Hinds, Pamela J. and Sara Kiesler (eds), Distributed Work (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 3-26. One important thing that communities do is manage ambiguity. I think that managing the nuances and ambiguities involved in a term like “community” is an important thing to do. When a community uses a term to point to something ambiguous it’s often a flag for one of those “it depends” conversations. Among other things, looking for familiar but ambiguous characteristics of something like “community” in the “blogosphere,” for example, is a useful thing to do.

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.