There’s a steady amount of experimentation that we do in the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop. Although it’s a workshop, not a community, both share the challenges that come up around experiments, like keeping track of what worked, culling the best stuff, putting the results in a place where you can find them. This post reports on some of our experiments — with community memory practices.

The expansive and emergent conversations that make up our workshop are (almost) as messy as a community, and because we wanted to demonstrate in the workshop how communities deal with these real-life issues, we’ve been experimenting with the idea of “weekly reifications,” showing a range of memory practices that take more or less effort and show different dimensions of “being together” in a community of practice. Here are some that we have tried recently (the “community logic” is on the left, a snapshot is in the middle, and a note about how it is relevant in the workshop is on the right):

A participant or member directory or roster is something that most community platforms provide. Drawing a ring around a group of people is an easy but meaningful way of suggesting group identity: it can show who was present, who involved in a project, conversation, or event.		When we put roster information in a “take-away” form, it’s available to participants after the workshop is over. Easy to produce and an important resource.
Looking at a group as if it were a community of practice and wondering what would be helpful to do is a key community development step. Apart from the insights that a social network analysis can generate, there’s something about getting a group to look at itself in a different mirror (or in several alternative mirrors and from different angles).		I use the group dynamics in the workshop to illustrate how social structure matters. These graphs take me a bit more effort and skill to produce, but it can generate powerful insights.
A wordle summary is a well-known way of showing what words were important in a conversation. It tends to mark the close of a conversation, so best not to post the wordle in the midst of a conversation you hope will continue.		Etienne produces a thematic summary of one of the conversations he has facilitated. The wordle is cheap and easy but nowhere near as interesting as what Etienne writes up.
Often it’s the sub-group conversations that end up having a big impact on a community: making these side-conversations visible and bringing their insights to wider view can be partly automatic and partly deliberate.		When participants go off in weeks 4 and 5 to work on projects, Bronwyn makes them visible as groups and highlights the results of their efforts.
Ward Cunningham says, “unfinished is good news for communities.” Scrutinizing a polished text can be a surprisingly refreshing community activity.		Having a discussion of about one of his relatively polished essays with Etienne through the comments feature in Google Docs is a refreshing alternative to our standard discussion platform.
As Beverly Trayner-Wenger said years ago about a CPsquare conversation, “The tangents tend to lead back to the main point.” A community’s URL cast-offs, when organized, can be of high value.		People who participate in the Foundations Workshop bring a tremendous amount of prior knowledge. Just collecting and organizing the references that come up in conversation is a remarkable resource.

Stay tuned. We make up or borrow new reifications and some fall away depending on participant interest and on the amount of time we have to play with. Each workshop is different.

We’ve had a regular series where CPsquare members and friends go on a virtual field trip to observe something about a community of practice, it’s activities, technologies, or challenges. Today Sylvia Currie and I organized something new — a group of CPsquare members watched two videos on YouTube together using Google-Plus. The idea of watching videos together has a lot of potential although G+ Hangouts seemed a bit messy at this point. It’s those small things like not being able to easily control who joins the Hangout that can create confusion. We experience several surprises:

• It worked perfectly for some: I selected the video, started it for everyone and could pause it at any point. People watching it could enter comments in the chat or talk over the video. But you can only watch videos that are on YouTube, so some of the videos from Pepperdine students that we would have considered for watching were excluded because of where they’d been published.
• Even with a uniformly experienced group with consistently high bandwidth and technology, there were some puzzling differences in experience. When someone speaks, their image jumps to the center of the screen — but their own screen doesn’t show that! Videos showed up on the main screen for some people but were in a completely other window for some. If you have the “video” tab clicked on it shows a “related videos” message after a video has finished. But people who did not have the video tab clicked on saw the regular behavior: the face of the speaker (or recent speaker), jumps up to the center screen as the discussion proceeds.
• I take detailed notes in the chat (and encourage others to join me in that practice). Since my keyboard is loud enough to be distracting during a conversation, I keep muting myself and have to un-mute to speak: it’s really clumsy to do that without a keyboard shortcut of some sort.

Bottom line: although there are clumsy things about it, having YouTube play a video for a small group opens up a lot of really cool possibilities.

Here is the agenda that Sylvia Currie and I had come up with:

In your check-in, give your name, location, and briefly describe any prior experiences attempting to get a group to “observe a CoP”?

After watching each video, we took the following questions one at a time:

• What did we see?
• Comment on the specific community that’s presented — What does it imply about “communities of practice”?
• What’s not shown? What’s not visible?
• As a result of our watching together, what do we see about our own blind spots?

We watched two videos:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgzZQCZxh5w Ice Skating Sensations
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nfo42ci-Ko Joseph Sikeku talks about the technologies he uses at FADECO radio to reach Tanzanian farmers.

Our wrap-up question was: what are some useful and meaningful ways to look at CoPs together?

Here is my list of take-aways:

• Access matters a lot: we’re not allowed to observe some communities (others may need to observe them on our behalf) or their business is so foreign to us that we can’t even understand what they’re about. The best we can do is get incrementally closer.
• Active and successful communities frequently have a support structure in the background that is invisible unless you look for it (which you might not do unless you understand something about the community itself).
• Individual interactions or specific roles are more easily observed than a community as a whole, but it’s that community context that gives meaning to the observable stuff.
• A community leader or convener or tech steward can see connections or relationships between people or tools that other community members may not be able to see (and that an outsider might not have access to).

Happy Corner, where the tailors studied by Jean Lave (2011) worked in the 1970′s, was a remarkable community of practice.  The community provided resources an individual couldn’t afford like sewing machines or cutting tables, real-time help making or verifying calculations, opportunities to groom reputations or gossip, partners for more difficult projects, and enough competition to keep everyone on their toes in an evolving economy.  The apprentices in the community become master tailors and then took on apprentices themselves.  In a world where education steadily narrows down (to teach to the test, in the name of efficiency), there’s a lot we can learn from that tailor’s community: work and community were not separate, work and learning happened in the normal course of the day, without separating work or learning from the larger world.  An important point that Lave makes is that the apprentices were not only learning to sew buttons and cut trousers, they were learning about how the world actually works, about how to collaborate and compete, about who’s who, and about how to make a living in a changing marketplace and world–from a tailor’s point of view.

We all change as we participate in communities of practice.  But our communities also change as we participate in them.  And the world changes as communities evolve.  Participating in communities of practice gives us access to knowledge about sewing buttons (or whatever our practice involves) but also gives us access to meaningful observations, orienting, decisions, and actions in the world of practice.  So when we seek to cultivate or support a community, we need to pay attention to how a community can provide that access to that world.  For that it helps to have formal models of some sort, so we can make sense of, and further enable, learning at individual, community and environmental levels.  (Formal models also help us to not romanticize communities, too.)

In this post I use John Boyd‘s OODA loop model to highlight the strategic role that communities of practice can play in giving us access to and making sense of a rapidly changing environment.  An OODA loop, according to Wikipedia, is “a concept originally applied to the combat operations process, often at the strategic level in military operations (notably in the design of the F16 fighter jet). (It’s interesting that Boyd’s paper on “Destruction and Creation” (1976) describes some community and learning issues very well while using a very mathematical and mechanistic language.)  These days, OODA loops are also applied to understand commercial operations and learning processes.   I’m going to use a religious community to illustrate how an OODA loop model focuses attention on how communities give access to the world of practice and to a fast-changing environment.

Here’s an overview of the OODA model. OODA is an acronym for:

The diagram in the Wikipedia article shows how the OODA loop is all about feedback:

A conversation on one of Jerry Michalski’s Yi-Tan calls got me thinking about OODA loops as a framework for assessing the role that communities can play in providing insights to a changing world.  At the time one of my clients seemed to think of a community they were developing as an information dissemination mechanism instead of as a learning opportunity with strategic value.  I wondered whether an OODA loop model could help.

It seemed obvious to me that an OODA loop would be a handy way of describing feedback processes involved in learning a simple skill, whether alone or in a more social setting.  So let’s lay the ground by looking at different levels of feedback that are possible when someone is learning to ice skate.  (Thanks to Noah Sparks, a student at Pepperdine University, for getting me to think of how ice skaters learn.)

	Learning to ice skate is all about feedback and balance: from our inner ear, from the horizon, and from the ice when we fall.  But trying to skate, falling, figuring out which way is up, getting up, trying it all over again, and keeping at it until we know how can leverage feedback on an individual as well as more social levels.
Learning in the company of others speeds things up and makes it a lot more fun.  Learning partnerships spring up at any moment according to our needs. When partnerships persist over time and involve a group of people, we have a community of practice, which harnesses very sophisticated feedback processes. An individual’s feedback loops are enriched when they have access to other people’s practice.
	When we look at the world through a community of practice, at adjacent communities, skills, and resources, we realize that a community’s practice itself evolves over time because of feedback from a fast-changing world.  For example, ice skaters have adopted story-lines and costumes from myth-spinners like Disney to add excitement and commercial appeal to their practice.

Instead of counting or mapping nested OODA loops (individual, group, across-groups) à la system dynamics, it seems most useful to tease out the most significant feedback layers. In the ice skating example we  get involved in a community of practice when we find that repeating a personal OODA loop in isolation doesn’t work as well as we need.  A community of practice gives us access to other ice skaters who are making relevant observations, orienting themselves, making decisions, and acting. (In fact the term “practice” gathers many iterations of OODA loops for a group of people into an intuitive whole that we can name, reflect upon, possibly identify with, and improve upon over time).

I’m going to use an unusual example, from Putnam and Campbell’s American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, to illustrate my argument because prayer is usually not seen as 1) a learning activity, 2) something that’s polite to talk about (outside one’s own religious community of practice), and 3) something that’s evolving in response to a changing environment. (Maybe I’ll argue these points in a future blog post.)  In the context of combat strategy it’s the speed and agility of an OODA loop that seems to get the most attention; I suggest that in the context of a community of practice, it’s the reach, diversity and coherent focus of a community that is most important. A vital community of practice can help us perceive and adjust to changing environmental conditions (beyond the challenge of just a single opponent in a combat situation) provided that community leadership attends to the possibilities that this OODA loop analysis will highlight.

In a vignette about Saddleback Church, a “mega-church” in Orange County, California, Putnam and Campbell describe an early morning breakfast at a Coco’s Restaurant (pp. 65-69).  Looking at a breakfast meeting as a community of practice helps us understand what’s going on. Listening to each other’s prayer requests over a sustained period time connects people to their church in an important way.  The vignette makes me think that OODA loops can be as much about compassion and fellowship as about combat.

I’ll focus in more detail on a story within the “Prayer Requests” vignette in American Grace to illustrate the OODA loop elements in a community context:

“Christina Firth, [is] a tall, slender thirty-something with an earnest, sober manner. She also is an attorney, but as she takes her turn to speak, she too alludes to a recent job change. Christina had been a top associate at a major law firm, but says she had become uncomfortable with the demanding hours she had to put in, and the consequent strain on her marriage. Through serious discussions with the members of her small group, she was encouraged to quit her job without any idea of where she would go. She took the “leap of faith,” and shortly thereafter was invited to join a former partner in starting a new venture, which, she says, has turned out to be a perfect fit professionally, as well as allowing her to work half the hours of her previous job.” p 66.

OBSERVE

Communities of practice give us access to observations about practice and the world — through the eyes of other practitioners.

Christina had shared the observation that her previous job was demanding more time than she was comfortable with.  During the meeting, other people in the group shared news and observations about an open position for a minister at Saddleback Church, the value of the anger management class in the church’s Celebrate Recovery program, and many details about the health (spiritual and otherwise) of their family members.

Communities let us access other people’s observations and imagine that they are our own, extending a specialized gaze much further into the surrounding landscape than would be possible for one person alone.  Our participation in communities can remind us what to observe, how to observe it, and corroborate specific observations.  Having common beliefs (or a knowledge domain), trusting others to share potentially sensitive information, and engagement in a common practice over time are important: all help focus observation, brings in observations from farther away, and gives us a larger repertoire of observations to work with.  As a result we can pool observations of a shifting landscape (including observations of adjacent practices, like “the practice of being a lawyer” in Christina’s example) on a regular basis. Of course communities have agreed-upon blind spots, too: in the example, nobody seems uncomfortable praying in a restaurant while cell phones are ringing, pop music is playing in the background, and wait staff breeze back and forth around the group.

Community leader’s strategy: make sure that your community’s interactions allow for sharing observations — plain old data — about the practice and landscape around your community’s practice. Does that kind of sharing get enough attention in community conversations? Community diversity and uniformity matter a lot here: if a community is too diverse, shared observations may not really be comparable, so they don’t sharpen each other; if the community is too uniform or specialized, sharing observations may feel repetitive, insignificant, and changes in the landscape are missed.  Purposely reaching for observations from further away than normal can be a stimulating and refreshing activity for a community.

ORIENT

Communities of practice give us access to a practitioner’s view of which way is up and what’s up in the world.

Christina thought that the long hours were putting a strain on her marriage. The Prayer Request group is made up of people who work, and work is a major component of their lives. So a lot of their prayers and spiritual life is concerned with work and work life. Making sense of work and marriage in the context of a spiritual practice is a perfect example of “orienting.”

In “Organic Design for Command and Control” Boyd says, “The second O, orientation – as the repository of our genetic heritage, cultural tradition, and previous experiences – is the most important part of the O-O-D-A loop since it shapes the way we observe, the way we decide, the way we act.” The “negotiation of meaning” is a key idea in Wenger 98′s community of practice framework, and that’s what “orientation” is.

Accessing how others orient themselves in the world is a powerful learning opportunity. In my experience of participating in communities of all sorts, holding up my observations and experience against someone else’s orienting framework is a key learning strategy.  A community of practice greatly enables consideration of adjacent practices, understanding their orienting assumptions and traditions. For example, how would a lawyer look at the Prayer Request group and visa versa?

Stepping back from the Prayer Request group, Putnam and Campbell conclude their Saddleback vignette by commenting:

“With its user-friendly form of worship, flexible theology, multileveled membership commitments, and diverse family of small groups, Saddleback Church seem to have found a way to be all things to all people, which may be one explanation for its staggering growth.”

Looking at Saddleback Church itself as a larger community of practice that instigates and supports all the small, specialized groups suggests other strategic OODA loops.  The many small groups gives the church access to how members are orienting in their daily lives, against a landscape of evolving practice in the larger society. Someone should be thinking about an important question, “How does work-life in Southern California affect the spiritual lives, needs, and practices of present and prospective Saddleback members?”  All the little groups that make up Saddleback Church put the church in a unique position to deal with this question.

Community leader’s strategy: facilitating conversations that expose the orienting process itself takes real care. Orienting as a process, for example, is inherent in telling stories about practice, but can easily get swamped by “best practice”, which often removes so much uncertainty that “orienting” is forgotten.  If your community doesn’t have enough diversity to make the orientation process a compelling area of learning, consider organizing learning expeditions or field trips where a community looks at orientation in a foreign context.  Repeating “best practice” ad nauseum, which many religious and spiritual communities tend to do, misses signals from the surrounding landscape.

Parboosingh et al. (2011), point out that sharing stories (which almost always involve all the parts of an OODA loop but never leave out the orientation step), gets physicians to begin “pulling” best practice into a conversation in a way that supports practice improvement. They argue that “pushing” best practice (e.g., by quoting “studies”), is less effective and does not create the trusting relationships that enable learning and practice improvements. (This example also suggests how local practice can be impervious to “best practice”.)

Although the first two steps of an OODA loop may be fundamental to learning, when organizations that sponsor communities evaluates a community’s value, observe and orient may seem like dispensable preliminaries — part of the cost side of the equation, not the benefit. It’s the decide and act steps that are most valued and which are directly influenced by regular interaction of a group of people who share a passion or concern.  Absence of “decide” and “act” in a community’s shop talk, suggests that the practice part of the idea is missing.

DECIDE

Communities of practice give us access to the decisions of other practitioners.

Christina was encouraged to take “a leap of faith,” which she did, and it led to a work situation that was perfect professionally and allowed her to work half as much as before. When she attributes the events “to God and to her small group,” it underscores the group’s important role in decision-making.

Deciding is more social than you would assume based on the stereotype of the lonely decision-maker. It may be that the meaning of a decision and the decision itself is set up in the orienting phase of Boyd’s scheme, but participating in community can make decisions better informed, less stressful, and more rewarding.

In 1997 I decided to leave what seemed like a privileged and secure job in the administration at the University of Colorado to seek my fortune in corporate America and later as a solo consultant. I would never have thought of making such an audacious decision without 5 years of involvement in a dialog group that in hindsight was a community of practice about workplace communication and identity. That dialog enlarged the set of conceivable decisions, because the intimacy of the group gave me access to other people’s decision space.  Communities thrive and are most relevant around practices that are difficult, for practitioners that make difficult decisions.

Community leader’s strategy:  enlarging the decision choices, making decisions more visible, and paying attention to the decision-making process are key strategies at a community as well as at an individual level. Identifying decisions by individual community members that were significantly improved by participation in a community is often an essential step in justifying the existence of a community. But being able to track decisions and their consequences takes sustained discipline and systematic listening.

ACT

Communities of practice give us access to practitioner’s actions, their consequences and their meaning.

Christina not only decided to quit her job, she went ahead and did it — and she landed a better one!  Christina’s visible action then becomes a resource for others in her community when they think about work and marriage.  Praying at a Coco’s Restaurant is a nice example of just how tricky the question of “action” is in connection with communities of practice. Whether you think that praying is action or not, or causes real things to happen in the world or not, depends on your beliefs (e.g., membership in some larger communities of practice).

How communities of practice interact with the Act step in an OODA loop is the most intriguing because of the “action-oriented” culture we live in and because of our frequently unreflective notions of what “action” is. Ordinarily the “action” part happens in the “real world” — outside of our communities, when we “stop talking about it” and go back to work.  “Just talk” is a common way of disparaging communities.   The notion that a community of practice means a breakfast meeting at a Coco’s Restaurant or a website where we go for chit-chat reinforces the separation between talking about it and doing it.  But Lave’s tailors seem to work almost entirely within their community, so there’s no “back to work” for them and no separation between productive work and the community’s life.  Facilitators and designers should take that level of participation and availability as a guiding vision.

Here are a few examples that connect communities and action in different ways:

• Josh Plaskoff told a story at CPsquare about the formation of a community of biologists in a big pharma company.  Sharing laboratory resources and eliminating duplicated work was a watershed event for the community and saved a lot of money.  Sharing could only happen because people came to trust each other (and each others equipment and laboratory practices).  As the community formed, the laboratory resource within the company expanded suddenly because scientists at “the other site” were no longer “them” — they were “us.”
• Recently, when Martin Rouleaux-Dugage presented to the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop, he observed that the best thing management can do to stimulate energy in a community was to ask something of them.   For a community, speaking out as a community on an important issue where it has real expertise can be a very powerful moment, in this case triggered by someone outside the community.  It extends a community’s visibility and reach when management recognizes a community’s authority on a subject.
• The Wenger, Trayner and de Laat scheme for assessing community value creation emphasizes the importance of tying community conversations to actual changes in practice (“back at work” so to speak).  In most settings, mapping actions back to community activities requires intention, discipline and effort.

Those examples all raise tricky issues of what actions are “in” the community versus those that are “outside” it: where is the community?  The question of action is also complicated because there are significant actions going on inside a community.  One nice example of “action” occurs earlier in the prayer breakfast vignette: “As they prepare to begin this [the prayer request] portion of their meeting, almost everyone pulls out a notebook and pen to write down what the others say.” The group has adopted a memory aid that potentially changes the practice and experience of prayer (to have requests that are written down).  This whole subject deserves more than another blog post. For the moment, I’ll just claim that communities can give us access and enlarge our sphere of action, can re-frame the significance of actions that we observe, and create an agenda of activities that will increase our capacity to learn.

Community leader’s strategy: “Where’s the action?” can be a really useful test that distinguishes the “Potemkin village” version of communities of practice from the real thing.  If it’s not clear how the talk in your community is influencing action, you should wonder about what it is you are doing. Is it possible for practitioners to look over each others shoulders as they practice? Is what’s visible (and what’s being discussed) really the practice you care about? Are relevant activities in adjoining communities visible? Would members of your community benefit from going on a field trip to observe?

CONCLUSION

Communities of practice give us access to a world of practice through access to other practitioners.

Thinking in terms of “access to practice” is a reminder that our participation in a community needs to be active, requires a clear intention, effort, and some self-awareness as practitioners.  An OODA loop model is a simple and handy way to think about the value and power of participation in a community of practice — about how exactly it provides access to practice.  Each step in an OODA loop is a facet of practice (essentially the OODA loop model is a general representation of “practice”).  One step may be over- or under-developed at the expense of others.  For example, is there too much emphasis on action at the expense of observation, or vice versa? In his paper “Destruction and Creation,” Boyd begins by making a fundamental point about how we must take responsibility for our perceptions and our meaning-making in a world of constant flux:

To comprehend and cope with our environment we develop mental patterns or concepts of meaning. The purpose of this paper is to sketch out how we destroy and create these patterns to permit us to both shape and be shaped by a changing environment. In this sense, the discussion also literally shows why we cannot avoid this kind of activity if we intend to survive on our own terms. The activity is dialectic in nature generating both disorder and order that emerges as a changing and expanding universe of mental concepts matched to a changing and expanding universe of observed reality.

I would only add that, although it can take a lot of individual courage to work on matching our mental concepts to a changing and expanding universe, the destruction and creation of these mental patterns is more often than not a collective effort, so we may as well sign up and do that hard work collectively, in a community.

Community leader’s strategy:

As community leaders it’s useful for us to think carefully and more formally about how a community provides access to practice and supports learning at individual and collective levels. The OODA loop model is particularly useful in these circumstances:

• A common but tricky effort involves shifting a community’s orientation, such as developing “ongoing conversations” when what’s been on offer is “content publishing.” (See Chapter 6 of Digital Habitats.) Paying attention to the OODA loop steps can suggest blind spots or holes in a community’s interaction where the new orientation could make a big difference, so people would be more open to exploration.
• When the environment around a community is suddenly more turbulent than it has been, it can be helpful to ask “How well do our mental concepts match the changing and expanding universe our practice?” A community of practice perspective, informed by an OODA loop model is a powerful lens. It suggests questions such as: need synchronized is our community with a rapidly-changing landscape?  Are we too narrow or too broad in term of focus or membership?  How can we reach viable, creative, diverse practitioners who are not currently connected?

So to summarize, as leaders we must ask, “does our community provide real access to a complete practice?” and, “is our practice, as we understand it, viable in the world that we can now glimpse?”  These questions are relevant, whether the community’s practice involves sewing pants in Liberia, dog fights in the air, ice-skating at the local rink, or praying at Coco’s.

REFERENCES

John R. Boyd, “Destruction and Creation,” 3 September 1976.  http://www.goalsys.com/books/documents/DESTRUCTION_AND_CREATION.pdf

Jean Lave, Apprenticeship in critical ethnographic practice (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011) http://isbn.nu/9780226470726

John Parboosingh, Virginia A. Reed, James Caldwell Palmer, and Henry H. Bernstein, Enhancing Practice Improvement by Facilitating Practitioner Interactivity: New Roles for Providers of Continuing Medical Education, J Contin Educ Health Prof. 2011 Mar; 31(2): 122-7.

Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010). 688 pp.

Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, and John D. Smith, Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities (Portland, OR: CPsquare, 2009) http://technologyforcommunities.com

Etienne Wenger, Beverly Trayner, and Maarten de Laat, Promoting and assessing value creation in communities and networks: a conceptual framework Rapport 18, 978-90-358-1808-8, Open Universiteit rdmc.ou.nl. 2011. http://www.bevtrayner.com/base/2011/05/monitoring-the-value-of-communities-and-networks

Thanks to Thomas Hawk, Russ Glasson, and looseends for their good photos.

You have to resort to some shortcuts to follow the conversation about communities of practice or just try to catch up. I have been impressed with recent conversations about communities of practice in LinkedIn, for example. It’s not a place where I would expect to find the topic pop up. In one recent conversation, however, a bunch of references to good articles were cited and Nicky Hayward-Wright ended up not only gathering them together but organizing them into a wonderful update to the Healthcare page on CPsquare’s Wiki bibliography. When you think of it each one of the bibliographies in CPsquare’s Wiki points to a conversation as well. Which brings up the question of the different flavors or meanings of the term.

Thanks to Bev Trayner, I just bumped into a comprehensive bibliography in the business and organizational studies literature that is a full length study of the concept by Enrique Murrillo. Murillo talks about how the concept’s “interpretive viability” makes it flexible but also has associated risks. Murrillo suggests that the recent decline in practitioner-oriented journals is “a symptom of the CoP concept becoming mainstream, an accepted addition to the Management vernacular.”

Essentially, how you use the term is kind of situated — say on whether you’re in healthcare or in business or education — or in the theory-construction business. (In his keynote talk at the Networked Learning Conference in Aalborg last May, Etienne Wenger suggested that whether you use the term or not depends on what you want to do.) I have to say that conversations in LinkedIn, CPsquare and com-prac among others, which lean on, borrow from, and occasionally heckle the academic literatures, are alive and well. Keeping a conversation going is an art with enduring interest. Even when you think you’ve figured it out, it seems there are surprises and more to learn. (For example, I thought that Digital Habitats would lead to more of a conversation about technology stewardship than it has so far. I wonder why?)

The turbodudes in Wenger, McDermott and Snyder (2002), for example, had a business model that was just assumed  as a norm in the book: the organization (Shell) provided all the resources and captured most of the value that the community produced.   We have seen many cases where an organization funds a community of practice to make a big splash but when their attention shifts, support for the community is withdrawn.  One reason that KM4dev has thrived, in my opinion, is that it has a very open business model in which no one organization holds the community captive.  Sustained funding (e.g., a sustainable business model for the community) matters because communities take time to grow and they deliver their value incrementally over time.  It seems to me that community business models can shape communities and frame the learning that takes place by:

• focusing on a topic and often giving it a particular slant,
• constraining community membership or opening it up broadly,
• constrain the kinds of problems considered or the way the community gets together.

A group of friends who are consultants in The Netherlands that I know through CPsquare have been meeting for many months, forming a community of practice focused on social media and learning.   Because I was passing through on the way to Effat University, they organized a session about business models.   They are thinking about the evolution of their own community and how business issues can impact the work they do with their individual clients (as organizations and as communities).  I talked about why I think business models matter to social media and community development work and held a world cafe, where we talked about that community’s business model in three rounds.  One of the points that Osterwalder makes is that it’s the conversation around a business model that really matters, so having a world cafe as a way of balancing diversity of perspective and the need for convergence is an effective strategy.  After the session in Wageningen, I worked on the slides I’d prepared and this post goes one step further.

Obviously the midwives in the Yucatan (one of the examples in Situated Learning, which I often go back to when thinking about communities) didn’t have much of a business model.  Learning was invisible because it was embedded in their daily work and social interactions.  There may have been economic exchanges in the community, but “the community’s resources” were probably not that separate from those of the surrounding society.

Today many communities need their own resources to get going, to function, and to flourish.  Here are some of the resources that communities can use:

• Facilitation to help a community launch or get connected.
• Meeting planning, organization, venues, and related resources.
• Technology infrastructure to help a community find a digital habitat that works for its learning needs.
• Curation of a community’s knowledge products or resources (organizing, maintaining, searching services such as a librarian might provide)
• Travel funds for community meetings or work sessions

The costs are real although they vary over time and often show up at the beginning of a community’s life, before its value becomes apparent or actually exists.  Although a low-cost, low profile strategy can be best for launching a community in the first place, using “free” tools can just mask them rather than explicitly address the issues connected with a community’s business model.  There really isn’t a free lunch.  A free platform is part of someone else’s business model.

These issues are most important to consider when members come from across organizational, political or social boundaries.  If a community is launched so as to cross those boundaries or might cross them as it grows, thinking through a business model in advance can be an important element of community formation, once the fundamentals of learning energy and agenda are addressed.  Without some careful thought up front the business model can unintentionally constrain a community’s boundaries or activities later on.

We see these issues when communities grow larger and seek to become more like a professional association.  And we see them when larger professional associations seek to recapture some of the intimacy and connection that they imagine in a community of practice.  For example, some professional associations will be constrained by their business model in the sense that they come to depend on a particular source of funding like publishing a journal, holding an annual conference, or depending on a particular dues structure.  Other venues for being together may be desirable from a learning perspective, it can be difficult to change learning directions or activities because the business model somehow constrains attention and defines the world of possibilities.

Business models can be useful to us from an entirely different perspective because being clear about the business model of a community or its host organization can be useful for thinking how we as social artists or interveners in learning systems should focus our efforts (or measure our value).  Having an intuitive understanding of an organization’s business model can suggest where in an organization learning plays an important role and where increased learning is needed but where it may not be activated.  In addition, if an organization is in a transition process, a business model can provide a map that is more stable than its organization chart, so it can be a stable reference point for thinking through a knowledge strategy.

The Community Orientations model that we discussed in Digital Habitats focuses on the different styles of communities.  Originally, we began by looking at clusters of tools, but then realized that we had come up with a typology of community styles that have technology implications but are fundamentally about how a community chooses to “be together.”  I haven’t thought through all the connections, but a community orientation has technology implications on the one hand and because it suggests that different ways of being together (with cost implications), on the other, it may imply different ways in which a community can generate the revenues it needs to support itself as a community.

It’s important to consider that the business model for a community is a peculiar beast because communities have different boundary characteristics than businesses.  A business has distinct boundaries.  Communities have fuzzy boundaries and often large peripheries.  That has implications for thinking through the business model: what costs are borne by a community collectively and what costs are borne individually?

The community orientations can help think through the different styles that have both cost and revenue implications.   Managing the different records,  representations and intellectual assets that being together produces can in turn have cost implications.  A content orientation suggests that a community might offer some of its most important products for sale on the ‘Net.  Different community projects might have funding from different sources.  Meetings might generate or consume a community’s resources.  There is no one right model, but it is important to think through what the learning implications might be for any given model.

Jost Robben has collected some resources about business models here and so have I.  There are many more resources tagged on delicious, whose business model is now in question.

• An email list, mainly for announcing upcoming calls, although occasionally someone will reply
• A wiki that lists ideas for upcoming calls and describes each speaker and provides some helpful links for each call
• A free phone bridge that makes an audio recording
• A podcast set-up for people who missed the call
• An IRC channel

Here are some of the practices that make it work:

• Short calls at a regular time (nominally 35 minutes, but they often go longer)
• Jerry always reminds people to mute themselves, and there haven’t been too many accidents such as people putting the call on a musical hold
• Jerry’s summary at the end of each call is a feat of comprehension and a useful review that gives you the feeling of a good “take away”
• The IRC channel supports the phone call and lets people share resources, heckle, queue up questions, and greet each other

A few months ago I was in a brainstorming session with Jerry and some other guys to talk about what might be added or changed.  Turns out that improving on this mix is difficult, suggesting that it might be the “minimum that would work” (to use Ward Cunningham’s phrase to describe his design goals for the first wiki).

• There is a twitter-stream which seems to augment the email announcements and supplement, but not replace, the IRC channel
• There is a huge back-channel that makes it all work; among other things, Jerry runs a retreat that brings innovators and techies together once a year

Thinking about this digital habitat led me to think about the business model or economic niche around this community.  I took a crack at describing it using Alexander Osterwalder‘s business model canvas:

Obviously there is a lot more to say and my guesses may be off, but:

• Whatever the mix of technologies and other resources are that support Yi-Tan, they work.  Three hundred weekly calls is about as close to “sustainable” as we get these days.  Whatever the business model of the Yi-Tan community is, it works.
• There is something really important about free-standing communities like Yi-Tan: they generate a lot of cross-pollination and idea-hatching.  I’m sure a lot of other people go to these calls just for the mind-stretching.  But the business model question is most important for just that kind of community (I’m not saying that Osterwalder’s scheme exactly works to describe the workings of a community, but it’s closer than anything else I’ve seen.)
• There is a kind of fitness and leanness about the Yi-Tan community’s set-up that those of us who work to set up and support communities for a living should think hard about.  Lavish support can lead to stupor so we need to be careful to not aim to set our fees as a percentage of whatever lavishness can be squeezed out of a corporation or a grant.

But there are are also differences between the two. Quoting from the Table 2.2 on p. 42 of Cultivating Communities of Practice (Wenger et al., 2002) proposes these differences:

Sometimes the two blur and the difference may be more about a point of view than anything else. In fact, it may be useful to think of project teams as if they were communities of practice in some cases, especially when teams are globally distributed, learning is a fundamental component of their assignment, and project scope is to be discovered as the project proceeds. Here are some ideas about when a community perspective on technology such as we propose in Digital Habitats may be useful for a project team:

• There are many cultural and technological uncertainties that come up when a project team is global. A part of the project’s work needs to be focused on learning how to cope with differences in time zones, bandwidth, technology environment, language, customs regarding deadlines or commitments, etc., etc. All of those elements have technology implications. The improvisational, emergent, approach we develop in Digital Habitats, and the frameworks we develop such as the polarities in Chapter 5, help us think about how to get conversations to address tricky questions issues such as, “How do we work together?”
• Who is on a project team is not always as clear as we’d like. Sometimes a key resource or contributor will be part of the network or surrounding community but not part of the formal project team. When the knowledge and skills required for a project are very cutting-edge or very diverse, project team membership sometimes can’t be known in advance, much less specified. All of the discussion about permeable community boundaries will apply in those situations because team members may need to bring an expert into a few technology-mediated conversations, not involve them in the whole project’s work-space. During the project of writing Digital Habitats, Nancy White kept repeating “Technology is used collectively but experienced individually,” (or something to that effect) till Etienne and I could say it on cue. In my observation, communities are expert at dealing with the differences in people’s experience of technology and somehow inventing ways of bringing people together despite the obstacles.
• Even when a community isn’t sponsoring a project, sometimes the community is the critical sounding-board or peanut gallery for the project. Unless the project team pays careful attention to the larger community’s conversations, the project will fail. For a distributed, technology-mediated team that may require that project team members stay involved in the conversations or activities of that surrounding community (which have more fuzzy and ad hoc technology boundaries than what we normally think about as “the project area”).
• When you observe projects in real life they are quite diverse, not just the instantiation so many Gantt charts. If we look closely we might find projects that are oriented toward “meetings,” “open ended conversations,” or “access to expertise,” or “relationships” much like the orientations for communities that we propose in Chapter 6. If those orientations have technology implications, the surely the orientations in projects must also.
• Finally, when a long-running project team experiences member turn-over, there’s a need to bring new members of the team into the team’s culture and tell them the stories from the team’s history. That sounds like the time for community thinking to me. Bottom line, there is more self-selection going on in project activities than an “everybody is on task in this project” kind of perspective would suggest.

Of course there’s the question of whether project teams can learn more from communities or the other way around.

To really talk about how to use a tool we’ve got to talk about all the buttons and about the user’s context and experience.  How we talk about the buttons and about people’s experience matters, given that we have so many tools to choose from, that we use them in tandem and that that the tools a community uses interact with each other in complex ways.   The experience using a tool and of talking about it affects usability, learning and collaboration.  This matters even more when we’re talking about technology at a community level.  Skype is complex enough to demonstrate the issues involved in understanding a community platform (even though we usually think of it as a personal tool). This post uses the language we developed in Digital Habitats to make sense of how Skype fits in the technology landscape.

First of all, Skype is not just one tool. It’s a platform with lots of different tools on top of it. The tools in Skype are essential for my work as a community leader. If you follow this discussion about how all of them work together, you’ll have a good example of the approach we developed in Digital Habitats to make sense of platforms in a way that brings out the issues around tool comparison, duplication, and integration.

A phone

It looks like a phone

The most obvious thing to notice about Skype is that it works like a phone. (Another phone? I already have several! My phone call arbitrage is complicated enough: I pay a flat fee for my plain old telephone system (POTS) land line for local calls and for long-distance within the US. And I already have a pre-pay scheme for cheap international phone calls! And I have a cell phone in my pocket. Why do I need another phone?) Well, Skype is actually two phone tools that have useful features in and of themselves and are integrated with other Skype tools that I’ll talk about below. The two phone tools are different in that one is for calling a POTS phone with a number and another for calling other Skype users (with a Skype ID)

One-to-one interaction on-the-spur of the moment is ideal for reaching out to community members – to find out what’s on their minds or provide exactly the help that they happen to need at that moment. In my community work I make it a point to ask people for their POTS phone numbers or Skype IDs.

In this post I discuss several Skype tools (not all of them) in terms of how their features are useful, how they work with each other and how they work with tools on other platforms that people in my community might use.  In a way this puts to work some of the analytical framework we develop in Chapter 4 of Digital Habitats. The polarities discussed in Chapter 5 are a big help in organizing our thinking about these issues.  So I represent each tool with a screen-shot and a diagram below it suggesting how the polarities seem to me at the moment.  The phone diagram shown below indicates that I think the phone is on the participation end (unless you reify the conversation with a recording); you have to participate in real time, so it’s synchronous (exchanging voice-mails moves the red triangle toward asynchronous); and it’s a one-to-one experience, so I place it close to the individual end of the spectrum.  The placements in this diagram then determine the placement of the tool in a tool landscape at the end of the post.

My impression of Skype as a phone

Each of the two phone tools has its interface: the Skype-to-POTS interface has a keypad that looks like the keypad on a regular phone. When clicking on the keypad gets tedious, you can just type in the number you’re calling in a text box labeled “Enter phone number.”

Lots to do with a contact

Notice that the two tools are really different in cost and function: it costs a small amount to call someone on a regular phone and you can’t receive a call back from them unless you buy a POTS number from Skype. A Skype-to-Skype call is free and it’s very easy for someone to call you back if they miss your call.  Integration asymmetries between Skype and other platforms force different interfaces, so make me think that Skype has two different phone tools.

Contact list

You make a call to another Skype user using its contacts list tool. The contacts tool partly overlaps with my Outlook, Gmail, and mobile phone contacts tools, but it does things that the others don’t. One is to show who’s currently “available,” indicated by a green dot with a check-mark in it, so it works like a global “presence indicator.” Also, you can group contacts, rename them, send them to other Skype users and perform various other actions.

Your personal contacts list is available whenever you log onto Skype – from whatever machine you use. (Surprisingly, the same account can be logged on from two different machines.) When you click on a Skype contact, you have the choice of calling their regular phone, which will cost you but is more attention-getting, or calling them on Skype which only “rings” on their computer.

In my opinion the most polite way to reach someone is to first check if they are available using the text chat tool (discussed next) and then call them on Skype or by regular phone only after the other party has responded that it’s OK to call. If we’ve made an appointment to talk and the other party doesn’t respond, I may call them on their regular phone, which rings loudly (and may be a mobile phone that they carry with them).

Chat: SMS and alert

Like the phones, Skype’s text chat tool is complicated: it’s the same on the front end, but different on the back end.

I'm running late

The text chat with other Skype users is a full-bore chat tool: like an instant message tool but better because it’s integrated with other Skype tools. For me it is the most frequently used of all Skype’s tools. Messages can be long and replying is easy. The interface is clean and it’s very robust: people are not dropped off a chat and they receive chat text even if their machine crashes. Skype keeps the chats on your machine since you installed it and you can search through them.

You can send a 160-character SMS text message to a mobile phone from the same window you use to call a POTS number (provided the number goes with a mobile phone). That’s handy but asymmetrical because a reply message from a mobile phone can only go back to another mobile, not to you on Skype. So it works more like an alert than a conversation tool.

Skype alert

Nancy White and I regularly use the Skype text chat as an alert – to drop notes off on each other’s desks. Often the drop-off is a URL and the message is no more than “Hey, look at this!” A direct message on Twitter or the inbox feature on http://delicious.com would be obvious alternatives, but on a windows machine Skype blinks so it’s visible and hard to miss. No response is required but an alert can lead to extended conversations.

Chat is one of the most versatile tools we have. A chat is useful for alerts, for sharing, for conversations, for negotiating meeting times, and on and on. It’s ironic that there are so many different and incompatible chat protocols and tools. Once you have a chat connection with someone the possibilities for collaboration increase dramatically.

A profile that gets used

How many profiles have you grudgingly completed in your life, imagining that someone you really need to be in touch with will find you? One for each community tool you have ever used, perhaps. If you’re like me, you’ve completed dozens of them and probably most of them are now out of date! Our likelihood of keeping them up-to-date depends on how frequently we use a tool or how close at hand the profile tool is. I keep my Skype profile current because I consider it an interaction tool, not just a publication. Skype’s profiles are in a proprietary format and not available outside of Skype.  However you can send a profile to another Skype user.

The Skype profile tool is an example of a tool that’s mostly an individual’s public description of themselves. But when you use the “mood message” to let people know where in the world you are or what you’re doing, it’s an interaction kick-off.

Hello world

Skype makes other people’s profiles useful by letting you modify or add to the information that they provide. Skype lets you edit other people’s names, which I find is handy if people haven’t completed their profile. Also, if you have a private phone number for someone that they don’t post on their profile, you can add it to your copy of their profile.

Skype would be a useful platform just for its one-to-one phone calls and text messages, but it becomes indispensable because the audio and text tools work in a many-to-many mode. Skype as a conferencing tool makes it a real community platform, especially given how all the other tools are integrated on the platform. Here again the user interface masks differences on the back end. A group chat is extremely robust, working in a point-to-point fashion: any one of those on the chat can drop out (e.g., turn of their computer) without affecting the others. And when Skype comes back up, the intervening text messages that were exchanged among the other parties to the chat magically appear on the machine that dropped out.

Group Chats

Chat is the workhorse

Audio conferences (not shown in a screen shot) are different: all the audio signals go through the computer of the “host” who initiates the call. If the host drops, the audio call ends for everyone. It’s important for an audio conference to be initiated by the person with the fastest and most stable Internet bandwidth: if the host is on a dial-up connection or an overloaded wi-fi network, it will impact everyone.

Another difference between audio conferences and text chats has to do with scale. A large number of people can be on a text chat, but an audio conference starts getting noisy and unstable well before running up against the Skype maximum of 9 callers.If everyone is on Skype, conference calling and group chat are nicely integrated. You have a “call Group button” to launch an audio conference from a text chat and a chat transcript appears automatically when you are on a group chat.

When a group is working on a project over a long period, for example, a long-running Skype chat is a great way to keep everybody connected and focused. Ten weeks is the record in my experience. When you turn on your computer in the morning, all the conversations between people in different time zones pop up.  The flexibility of chat makes it an ideal tools for coordinating work on other platforms.

Contact groups

Which list are you on?

Over time you accumulate a lot of contacts in Skype and it’s very helpful that Skype lets you organize them into Groups. Skype automatically creates some groups, such as “recently contacted” or “requests from new contacts.”  But you can create as many groups as you want.  Adding people to or removing them from a group is easy and you can put people in multiple groups.

The groups tool is useful in combination with other tools.  For example, when you select a group, you can easily see who is currently logged on to Skype.  What that means depends on whether being logged on to Skype at a given point is a norm in that group of people or not.  A Skype group makes it easy to start a group chat or a group audio conference.  One advantage of using a group to set up a chat is that you include people whether they are logged on or not; when they do log on, the chat messages will pop up on their computer.

So what?

Classification a tool using these polarities always seems debatable..  We developed them as a natural way to help a technology steward take a step back from the hands-on level and think about the experiences that enable a community to be together and to learn.  This tour of Skype is not meant to prove anything: it’s more suggesting a way of making sense of a technology.   Here are some parting thoughts:

• The polarities and how they play off of each other are intuitive  and practical. They are most useful as a stimulus for conversation.
• Tech stewards need to understand what it’s like to use a tool and to be able to talk about the experience and the tool separately.
• Preferred, ignored, duplicate, or competing tools all make sense within this social and technical mix we call a digital habitat.
• Each software feature makes sense within the context of a tool, and each tool is framed by its position on a platform, which has meaning in the context of a configuration that’s shared by a group of people.
• In a way it’s all circular because you can’t see a community’s configuration (or digital habitat) directly or simply.
  • You can’t stand outside of your own digital habitat
  • You can’t really see a community unless you’re participating in its habitat
  • Seeing a community’s habitat as members see it requires relationships and access to their practices, habits, and cultural context
  • Understanding the role of a tool in a habitat involves a sense of shared timing and even group improvisation

A provisional placing of Skype tools on the digital landscape

What do you think?

(Cross-posted on the Digital Habitats blog.)

But I think that “uniqueness” is a good proxy for working purposes.  In other words: could (or should) a conversation we’re proposing for your community be happening elsewhere?   Why here?  Why now?

I’ve admired CHI-FOO because its programs have been thought through a year at a time.  That takes a lot of work and a lot of focus.  That kind of planning is likely to force a community to ask those questions about uniqueness.  But have a look at this bit of the 2010 program description:

The 2010 CHIFOO program series will arm you with fundamental design leadership skills and inspire you to flirt with the edges of possibility. In monthly presentations throughout the year, experienced practitioners and speakers will explore how you can:

• Navigate through power structures and create momentum for interaction design initiatives
• Ensure that your message reaches a broad audience and produces a sense of urgency
• Take calculated risks that will further the discipline of human-computer interaction
• Stir positive change in the world through design thinking

Couldn’t you insert accountants, administrators or anthropologists into that statement without changing it much?

Some other warning flags:

• I know it’s a much honored practice, but when community announcements state “at the end of this talk you will know” x, or “you will be able to y,”  I get skeptical.
• When a topic is someone’s book, like tonight at CHIFOO, take a careful look at whether the presentation is more serving the community or the speaker’s needs. The fact that I could catch that speaker at Powell’s tomorrow night or watch him on TV (or on a video of his TV appearance) does not suggest that I’ll learn much about human computer interaction at tonight’s session on “Confessions of a public speaker.”

Maybe I should flirt with Toastmasters instead?

If you are really interested in communities of practice, you should join us as we consider questions such as:

• In what ways is diversity and a global diaspora a resource for a community? In what ways are those characteristics a challenge?
• What individual and group interests are served by the community? How are they balanced? What leadership is needed and can leaders be compensated for their work, apart from learning as a leadership benefit?
• What activities make sense and what publications are useful in the development process?

The goal we set for ourselves in Shadow the Leader is to meet and reflect with a leader of a community of practice over a sustained period of time, getting to know a lot about one community.  It’s an opportunity to consider what we really know and really understand in terms of theory, of technology and of leadership.  From the very beginnings of this field, starting with Lave and Wenger’s Situated Learning, we have made progress due to scrupulous observation that took into consideration what we think we knew about learning but questioned our assumptions at the same time.  The “Shadow the Leader” series has operationalized that systematic scrutiny and reflection in the life of CPsquare.