I’m organizing the fourth year of CPsquare’s shadow the leader series. We’ll be visiting with Josien Kapma, a Dutch dairy farmer living in Portugal every month for a year.  She’s a member of CPsquare and the leader of “Melken Over De Grens” or “Milking on the border” — http://www.melkenoverdegrens.nl. It’s a global community for expatriate [...]

In considering whether to take the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop, a PhD student in the healthcare field wrote asking whether the workshop would be useful to her, given what she was doing: I am going to examine what [communities of practice are already there in an academic health care setting] …. or as [...]

Tags: cpsquare, foundationsworkshop

I’ve always found webinar software like WebEx, Elluminate, or GoToMeeting to be constraining and, because they try to be a “total solution” they don’t play well with other uses or software.  Because they’re popular they’re used in situations where they’re inappropriate.  The Digital Habitats wiki, for example, doesn’t go into enough detail about their uses [...]

Tags: intronetworks

Yesterday someone on the staff of the Inter-American Development Bank asked an interesting question on com-prac: Could you please share with me what the practices (and or policies) regarding the “housing” of CoPs in your organizations are?  Do you house them outside the firewall of your organization?  Does your organization endorse officially this external sites [...]

For a couple of years it wasn’t “a book” but just “an update”.  After our ideas started getting more interesting and more useful, I took to taunting my co-conspirators Etienne Wenger and Nancy White that what is now Digital Habitats “is actually a book.” Later, when we all admitted that it was indeed a book, [...]

Ward Cunningham just recently set up his own channel on YouTube and has edited a conversation we had last Fall.  His philosophy for conducting interviews is simple and effective: make guests feel comfortable and ask them questions that make them look good. He did a great job making me feel comfortable. We start by talking [...]

Tags: technology_stewardship

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 [...]

Tags: tagging

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]