Learning Alliances

It was really hot on August 13, the last day of my vacation visiting my brothers in Puerto Rico. But, in more ways than one, it was really cool inside the library at the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras, where all of my friends from high school went to college.

I was hosted by José Sanchez-Lugo, a UPR professor I met in the Connected Futures workshop last May. He and his colleagues are doing fascinating work. They are way beyond the “ills of bestness” that Patrick Lambe describes. When I think of fights I’ve had with program evaluators who are trying to make a community of practice initiative fit into a neat pigeonhole, it’s inspiring to see someone launching a bunch of active communities with the original funding from an evaluation effort. Not only have they developed their reflective practice in areas such as collection development or research support, they’ve cooked up new directions for innovation, such as virtual reference or uses of Second Life.

Here’s Liz Pagán’s report (titled, roughly, “yet another distinguished Puerto Rican” :-).  There is a lot of activity in the various blogs and wikis of the communities launched by this project.  (One great thing about this visit, apart from a couple hours with José himself) was that it gave me the chance to practice my “communities of practice” vocabulary in Spanish a week before a project in El Salvador.  Talk about just in time practice!)

CPsquare is having a book club event, where everyone is invited to read a book about communities of practice together. Sounds simple enough, right? Fortunately or unfortunately Communities of Practice: Creating Learning Environments for Educators is a book where, if you’re interested in communities of practice, you might want to read all the book chapters. Not to be thwarted the book club organizers, Bronwyn Stuckey and Jeffrey Keefer organize a process to figure out who in the community wants to be involved, what general themes are most important to them, and within that, which specific chapters we’re going to read together. Ah, now we can sit down with a deep dive into an excellent chapter about how academics in South Africa adopt new technologies and think about teaching, right? No.

It turns out it’s even more complicated. A synchronous read is a wonderful idea but to actually make it happen takes a huge amount of effort. Fortunately, in this case, all the organizers are doing an amazing amount of work. And that includes the book editors, too — evidence that Chris Kimble, Paul Hildreth and Isabelle Bourdon love their (and our) topic.

Both the public discussion and the back-channel is filled with all kinds of little efforts, arrangements and negotiations to make sure that everyone has the books in hand on time. How can you deal with the Danish taxman? How’s mail delivery in Kenya? Who can help? Could the publisher do anything? Does the publisher have any responsibility or interest in the matter? Could we somehow find a work-around? What are the constraints?

Well it’s not all worked out yet, but it makes me stop and think: where does the real community work start and end? Isn’t all the angst around getting the stupid book in people’s hands a really important part of a community’s learning? And don’t all those email threads that are now getting longer and longer say something really important about CPsquare’s values? I think so.

It says something about how people care about each other’s individual learning and our collective inquiry. And I don’t think that’s at all trivial.

Several months ago, Diana Larsen presented her work on Agile Retrospectives at ODN. I bought the book on the spot. And later I watched this video where Diana and her co-author talk at the Googleplex:

In this day and age, when so many forums on a favored topic are sold as communities of practice, it’s cool to see people doing the work of convening and cultivating communities without using the name but all the learning vigor imaginable. These agile retrospectives seem to use very little technology in their interactions (apart from flip-charts and yellow stickies), even though the expected members are very technology-literate.

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/

During the Council meeting at the Portland Shambhala Center last week, Paul Refalo, the Center’s director observed that he can always give two alternative responses to the question of “How’s the Shambhala Center?” He can say that things are falling apart and that they are just coming together. And he said he could give substantial detail for either assessment. Joan Sears, the Treasurer, said the same paradox applied to the Center’s finances. The same week that she’d worry because of two requests to stop automatic dues payments would somehow be balanced by surprisingly generous new members who sign up. Over the years I’ve found that a Shambhala Center is a great example for thinking about the balance between an organization that provides education and services to its members and a community of practice with all the emergence that makes communities lively.

There’s nothing new, in a way, about our proposal for improving the tools for providing legs and pockets that communities of practice could use. What Josien Kapma and I are talking about is making it easier for communities to become just slightly more like organizations, along the lines of Clay Shirky’s airline passengers rights example in Here Comes Everybody. Our point is that somehow technology has helped the informal and conversational side without supporting the formal and financial side as much (or at least keeping them quite separate). Getting the learning and the informal side to coexist with the other side — so that neither one is subordinate or compromised — is quite the trick. It involves technology stewardship as well as leadership.

Joitske’s comments about transparency remind me that transparency is conventional, collectively understood and never completely absolute (whether in a community of practice or in other settings). That leads me to the question of, “What community-like characteristics are essential when adding organization-like characteristics?” I think here are some important ones:

• Negotiation of meaning. Communities grow around some fundamental openness to their practice and what it means. That makes them and their finances kind of messy. But it also implies a capacity for resolving or repairing disagreements. Groups that are all talk and no practice may not really need pockets because they don’t need legs.
• A history of learning together, so there is some authentic social capital. Sharing real capital (in modest amounts, according to the community’s maturity) ought to be completely natural. A learning path suggests that legs are needed.
• Communities have developed practices of being together in ways that create value that’s not fundamentally monetary but occasionally depends on having the cash to support being together. Having someone else, like Google, monetize being together, may or may not be OK. Better to have your own pockets than live in someone else’s.
• Distributed leadership and several overlapping systems of status means that different people can speak or act on behalf of a community in different regards. Somebody may spend money on behalf of the community without necessarily being the paragon of polished practice. But some kind of integrity is negotiated or the community falls apart.
• A wide periphery and enough of a sense of identity. The whole point is that “people like me would help,” perhaps by contributing money. Our own journey is connected to that of the communities we belong to.

One idea that occurs to me is that for the scheme we’re thinking of to work, there needs to be a repository that can catch the left-overs when communities fall apart. That might be an interesting new role for CPsquare, provided that at that moment it’s coming together, not falling apart.

A dollar is not a dollar: it depends on which stash it’s kept in.

Josien Kapma and I have been doggedly working in and around CPsquare on the question of how to put pockets and legs on small online communities for at least a year. By legs, we mean helping communities get places (usually requiring the expenditure of effort and or money). By pockets, we mean helping communities have stashes of money. A Facebook example follows. We’ve got a session accepted for the AoIR conference in Copenhagen. We’ve mostly tried to look at existing communities but recently thought we might learn more if we took a design fantasy approach.

Jean Lave’s ideas about how families manage their money have been very provoking for me because they help me get my head away from an accounting view and into a more informal and intuitive view. In Cognition in Practice, she talks about how families have many different “stashes” of money with negotiated, collectively understood rules for moving money between the stashes. Expenditures of a certain sort are made from one stash and not the other. This is like fund accounting in higher education. So a dollar is not a dollar: it’s value and meaning and usability depends on which stash it’s kept in. Universities, for example, can be in dire financial straits in one fund and be quite wealthy in another fund. Funds can borrow from one another, but they have to pay it back. This diagram suggests what some of the stashes and money flows in a complex family look like:

So to develop a Facebook example. What if there were a little “Facebook app” that were tied to a group (not an individual, where most of them are now). Imagine a group that would form around Bronwyn Stuckey’s “Community Capers” project. It has a Facebook Group (it’s so easy to join) and a blog (it’s so easy to follow) and a calendar (it’s so easy to add it to your own calendar so events show up). Why not a bank account and a little money management system? Here are some things it might do:

• Gather donations from guests, members or participants. (Might want to put limits on amounts of money, so it stays informal.)
• Provide a way to send gifts (gift certificates) to speakers or others who make a significant contribution (like send a specific book to everyone who contributes to an event). (Might want to limit payments so they go through Paypal.)
• Allow the group to pay for infrastructure like domain names, elluminate costs, phone conferencing costs (for people calling from France, for example), storage (lots of audio files, etc.)
• Allow the group to throw its weight around by giving a scholarship to someone, paying for travel, or do other good deeds (according to its values and goals).

The key is to make this kind of thing as easy as setting up a group. And to make it really transparent. That might mean:

• A group has a couple of different stashes which are clearly labeled
• When you give, you designate the stash it goes into
• Moving money between stashes is rule-bound and explicit
• Different people have different levels of control over different stashes
• All the transactions are clear to everyone, showing up on a group “Wall” or something.
• Imagine the possibilities: “groups like yours spent their $5 on items like …”

– References

Jean Lave, Cognition in Practice: mind, mathematics and culture in everyday life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

One of the issues around participation in communities of practice is “having enough time.” We challenge people to declare that they have enough time before participating in a CPsquare workshop. But people have always experienced a lot of desire and some disappointment during the Foundations workshop. It seems like there is always more to be said, another angle to consider. It turns out that the Connected Futures workshop is the same in that regard. Nobody has as much time as they’d like.

It’s amusing to hear Clay Shirky’s response to a TV producer who asks, “Where do people find the time?” Bottom line: people have less and less time for screens that don’t have a mouse attached, where you can’t do something that’s meaningful. We are actually confronted by a surplus of time if we look at it from the right point of view.

Although in fact doing one of these CPsquare workshops (whether as a leader or a participant) involves sitting in front of a computer for many hours, in some ways its a lot of exercise. They’re designed so that you have to do a lot of stuff: you can’t just sit there. Although people going through the experience do so as individuals, it’s usually on behalf of an organization or a cause or some kind of intention that’s beyond themselves as individuals. Diabetes could be a useful metaphor to think about the consequences of spending time in a different way. This article in the April 24th 2008 issue of The Economist (”How to spend it; A region awash with oil money has one or two clouds on the horizon“), talks about how sedentary the population as a whole has become in some
middle-east countries, leading to very high rates of diabetes. But it caught
my imagination as a way to step back and think about how we spend time on a larger scale:

Diabetes is a useful metaphor for the Gulf’s present problems. The region’s economies are struggling to absorb petrodollars, accumulating like glucose in the bloodstream. The risk they face is the economic equivalent of renal failure: inflation, a hollowing-out of the non-oil sector, and a young, growing workforce in chronic need of outside labour to supplement it.

The analogy is that learning passively is like consuming too much candy, year in and year out. It gets you high, but it can have long-term, quite negative consequences. I guess it could be that with the intellectual equivalent of renal failure you get lazy about chopping wood, don’t know when you need to learn and you might be kidding yourself when you think you know. Or something.

Now if we could just get CPsquare workshops to involve heart-pounding, aerobic exercise, too!

In a simpler setting, when we’re launching the Foundations Workshop, for example, I have developed a whole set of heuristics for figuring out when people are engaged and the degree to which they are connecting with the group. Some of the tell-tales I use include:

• Have they logged on?
• Have they sent me their picture (avatar) or uploaded it themselves?
• Have they posted something?
• Is there evidence that they are navigating in different places and have some sense of what it means to post in different places?

During the first few weeks of a workshop, I have found a lot of different ways to model useful online behaviors, including:

• Expressing enthusiasm
• Disclosing essential information in a conversational way (rather than in an instruction page)
• Acknowledging and correcting mishaps
• Using the technology-mediated environment for contracting and engagement (rather than just information storage and retrieval)

But what is being presented in the Foundations Workshop is how to collaborate and be together in a community. That seems rather simpler than modeling or presenting technology stewardship. (I guess I’m thinking out loud here about what I find challenging so far about this workshop.)

In this workshop we’re establishing presence and making a lot of connections. People are asked to get access to:

• a wiki
• Web Crossing
• a blog
• del.icio.us
• Skype
• Flickr
• an RSS reader
• Twitter

And then we’re trying to connect all of these tools together. So needless to say, people establish themselves on these tools incrementally and as one of the workshop’s technology stewards, I try to connect them all. There are some ways in which the process I’m following seems unique:

• Trying to get everyone up and running at the same time — as opposed to a gradual gathering of people and technologies
• Trying to establish both a private face and a public one for a group
• Trying to support everyone more or less equally (obviously some technologies are old hat to some people and others are struggling with several new tools all at once)

Trying to compress a process in a workshop has all kinds of implications that are surprising. And I know that I don’t even see all of the issues yet. What am I missing?

Our connected futures workshop is off to a good start, I think. The launch phone call went well. For some of us, having a telephone call is very comforting. You feel like there’s a real person on the other end of the line (or in that other corner of the telephone bridge cloud, perhaps?).

But for an “advanced” workshop on technology stewardship it is fiendishly difficult to assess exactly what competence and comfort people have with one, let alone the many, many, technologies that are now available for a community to use. In fact it’s difficult to self-assess, without some extended collaboration and meaning-making episodes with other people.

We’ve come up with one light-hearted attempt at getting an inkling of workshop participant’s “state of technology.” (Analogies with “state of mind” come flooding in.) We’ve asked people to make a little snapshot of their desktop, giving everyone else an indication of what software they have on their screens most of the time. Here’s mine:

It may not go far enough… In many organizational settings the simplifying strategy has been to mandate a standard. A community setting thrives on diversity and raises the issue, “how do you know what others see, or what they feel comfortable with?”  I think one part of the answer is that it takes time.  Which is something that we try to compress, at our peril, in a project like a workshop.

At the end of January I led an effort in CPsquare to hold a conference that we titled, “Long Live the Platform.” It was a great experience. Sue Wolff took the lead in writing a report that describes the method of organizing the conference, the sustaining motivations driving participant roles, and some of the memorable learning gained by the CPsquare community. As part of the process Lynn M. Tveskov interviewed me about what went on behind the scenes.  I got into telling her the story, even going a bit overboard.  After she wrote up our notes, I came up with a more analytical description of what I did as a conference organizer:

We have organized quite a few community field trips in the Foundations Workshop. They take a lot of coordination but can provide invaluable context for considering all kinds of issues, including the use of technology. In the early days, when they were set up as a solo activity, participants were given an URL and sent off to visit and report back. That approach was generally unsuccessful. The field trips organized for the LLP Conference built on recent experience in the Foundations workshop where we made a field trip as social a process as we knew how to do. Our field trips allowed conference participants to pull up a chair “virtually” and have an interactive and social visit with an insider from a community. Questions could cover technology, community goals, facilitation, membership, community orientation, etc. - all those elements that are woven (and sometimes blurred) together in a successful community.

CPsquare, like every community of practice has its energy peaks and valleys. The previous fall had been a period of somewhat low energy. The LLP Conference was a real energizer for CPsquare. The Conference became an example of the value that the CPsquare community can generate. In the LLP Conference we hit a very productive balance between old CPsquare members, guests, and members who joined the community because of the LLP Conference. This combination provided enough diversity, coherence, social history and collective development of a joint repertoire. People were able talk effectively about the issues that mattered to them. Several months later, people still find value browsing through the conference discussions.

Organizing the conference required balancing several conflicting goals:

Planning: “hurry it up” vs. wait for it to mature. The idea of this conference had been brewing in the community for months. At a certain point it was necessary to name a date, try to pull all the threads together and run with it, hoping that volunteers would rally round a proposed agenda. I then pushed a conference planning process, a statement of benefits to members and guests, a new procedure for member registration, distinct levels of participation, platforms and speakers. It was overly ambitious but in the end it worked for most people.

Timing: concentrate the schedule vs. spread it out. The original thinking was to spread out the platform visits across 6 months or a year. It was clear that concentrating all the visits into 3 weeks would limit depth, but it enabled comparisons between platforms and enough feverish intensity to make participation exciting. A very concentrated event forced everyone to prioritize their time, although many people felt like they missed out on conversations they wished they’d jointed.

Scheduling: plan it in advance vs. plan as you go. Given that there was a lot of uncertainty in the conference agenda and inquiry process and not really enough time to plan it all out, I was not able to plan the conference out completely in advance. After the target date was set, a high-potential platform spokesman seemed to evaporate, not responding to emails or phone calls. The schedule for the third week was not really worked out till the middle of the second week. This required an act of faith from participants, but it also let us figure out what was working and what was worth emphasizing.

Staffing: recruiting volunteers vs. just making it happen. Although the LLP Conference was designed as a community event staffed by volunteers, there was plenty of work that I could not delegate (or could not figure out how to fast enough). Volunteers participated in the event’s discussions, helped design it, and signed up to present. But recruiting volunteers could not really be delegated (nobody else knew quite as much about who to ask or what to ask them for). There are many other administrative tasks that could not easily be delegated to volunteers such as guest registration, access control, platform management, teleconference logistics, etc., etc.

Protocol: role flexibility vs. role adherence. The conference roles were intended to involve the community, spread out the work, insure that technical, leadership and other perspectives were woven together in the conversations, and build distinct levels of participation into the conference structure (e.g., from casual observers who were just taking a look to people who were ready to spend a lot of time because they were facing an impending technical or community design decision). The roles and work plan could only be a goal since some slots could not be filled and in some cases individuals had to and were able to span several roles.

Focus: presenting individual perspectives vs. developing a negotiated understanding. Tapping the expertise of people who know a lot about a particular platform (e.g., leveraging the knowledge of a vendor, a programmer, or a technology steward) would produce interesting presentations but it would not necessarily help us develop a deeper understanding of the issues. We had found that “other people’s perspectives” on community platforms could be quite intractable and incomprehensible – “my platform is better than yours and I have no idea why you still like yours.” CPsquare is full of people who disagree on many, many issues, including the platform we use for our own discussions. This led to our focus on specific cases, personal experience, and platforms as seen through the eyes of a specific community (not an abstract or “general” community). That was followed by a free-wheeling conversation about the evidence we gathered together. This was quite ambitious, risky, and labor intensive, but it seemed essential to try.

The LLP Conference was a great experience for me. I learned a lot about organizing a collective inquiry as well as about the platforms and communities that we visited.