Learning Alliances

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/

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.

Think that TWITTER may not be enough of a platform for your community of practice? Need something more homey than del.icio.us? Think that a full-fledged platform THAT YOU PAY FOR may be needed?

I’ve thought for a long time that how you look at and assess the fit between a community and its platform matters a lot. Writing the book with Etienne Wenger and Nancy White and several other activities in CPsquare have convinced me that an “outsider’s vew” (whatever that means) can be so mis-leading.

Join us at CPsquare, where we’re exploring a half dozen platforms together — attempting to look at the software through the eyes of a community that’s been living on that platform for a while. See registration details here: http://www.cpsquare.org/News/ … Currently we’re expecting to visit:

• xPERT eCommunity (Q2learning)
• CompanyCommand - Eco (Tomoye)
• TBA - Web Crossing
• DITAUsers - Drupal, Timeline, Wordpress, Moodle, Yahoo Group and Mediawiki
• CIARIS - Custom-made using Ruby on Rails
• Story-telling in Organizations - Ning
• Best practices in e-learning community - Moodle and Facebook

For each platform / community combination we’re having several levels of engagement:

• Read a post about the community and the platform, written by a knowledgeable person
• View a video that represents a tour of the aforementioned community
• Self-register to use a “play space” where you can get a sense of what the software is about and how it works
• Participate in a discussion on the platform itself with community members about their community and their experience of using the platform
• Participate in asynchronous discussions back here that summarize or reflect on all the foregoing
• Participate in a synchronous phone conference about all of the above
• (Might be follow-on summarization and reflection and meta-conversations)

Rather than asking which platform is “the best” we are asking, “what kinds of communities thrive on each of these quite different platforms?” We’re inviting community leaders, technology stewards, and software vendors to all spend three weeks together thinking about issues of common concern. In the end I’m sure what we understand about some of these platforms will have a superficial aspect, but we’ll know a lot more about what questions to ask…

The event is organized by CPsquare members and is open to guests who register ($100) here: http://www.cpsquare.org/News/ (CPsquare members who are presenting or facilitating can bring a guest for free.)

Elliott Masie always does a great job creating buzz for his events, and his use of IntroNetworks pushes the use of the software to the next level by having people like Sarah Lynes, a member of his staff, facilitate the whole colleague discovery process for big conferences. His screen-cast gives a sense of who attends and how he’s deployed the software.

As I’ve written before, this is software that you have to configure and shape according to the audience that’s going to attend your event. The way Masie uses it, the four buckets that become quadrants that are used for matching include “About Me,” “My Work,” “My Expertise” and “Seeking Solutions.” Charles Steinfield admitted that having one quadrant dedicated to “Geography” was kind of a waste of mindshare for the C&T Conference. I think it’s interesting how he invites participants to identify their age group, presumably to help you find people the same age?

I’ve been thinking that screen-casts like Masie has produced are really going to be very important in the future because they provide a way to “look over each other’s shoulders” to see how to use the software, how to configure it, and how to fit it into the social framework. I still think that this software looks and feels very separate: Masie says, for example, that email addresses are not listed (because conference participants are not trusted enough, I assume). No mashup here.

We live in an interconnected world where machines log on to other machines to do work on our behalf. That’s what del.icio.us now does every night: it gathers up all the tagging I did during the previous day and posts it on this blog. It’s part of a mashed-up, service-oriented world. I’m writing this posting using ScribeFire, another mashup, which also posts to the blog on my behalf.

Some of my discomfort with IntroNetworks: it seems like more of “an application” than “a service” (in the mashup sense of the term). I’m really enthusiastic about IntroNetworks, and really impressed with what Chuck Steinfield did with it. It’s accurate, in uncanny ways, but it feels so separate. That separateness is probably both the result of technical limits and the culture around conferences the company serves. It certainly is a world where there is no profile standard that everyone adheres to and everyone would rather keep their profile information private, isn’t it?

The morning I left for the airport, after the Communities and Technologies conference, I bumped into a grad student in the lobby, who was waiting for a taxi to take her to the bus stop. We decided to run for it instead and struck up quite the conversation as she struggled with two bags, one with a handle that was way too short, and with one shoe strap that kept falling off. Afterwards, I found that she was “standing right beside me” in the IntroNeworks “me display.” Too late for an intro, but useful for a follow-up, better than the business card she’d given me. We got to the bus just in time and she sat a row behind me on the other side of the aisle (the bus had wifi!) and we looked each other up. “Oh, that’s you.”

A few days later, Jerry Michalski’s Yi-tan call about “exhaust data” and Facebook turned up an interesting connection. Grant McCracken observed that Facebook does a pretty good job of keeping a connection going after it’s been established, say, at a conference. He wrote about it later. Facebook certainly does a good job of drawing you back in and creating a sense of social activity — of life on the net. Someone on that Yi-tan call said something like “every venture capitalist these days will ask you what kind of a Facebook application strategy you have.” Facebook’s very openness is compelling. Online, there is no meaningful distinction between “business” and “social” And it’s certainly persistent.

I’ve been thinking about how the use of technology can change events for a long time. Participating in distributed communities like CPsquare has caused me to travel more than ever before, but the design of events such as conferences and dialogs themselves seems resistant to the use of technology.

Especially since the first two International Communities and Technologies conferences have been mostly innocent of technology (apart from PowerPoint and wi-fi access if you’re willing to hike), it’s great that C&T2007 is using an application like IntroNetworks. Provided that wi-fi access is stable and available throughout the conference space, I think this application can change how you meet and interact with people at a conference. It may be because I am prone to shyness attacks at conferences, but helping people visualize who’s going to be there and actually get in touch before and afterwards helps position a conference as one event in a larger conversation (or at least a longer-term one).

So it’s hard to tell the difference between the platform as designed and the service as provided (e.g., by the conference organizers, who I think put lots of work into using the platform) and the experience at my desktop. (That’s one of the things motivated us to keep working on the Technology for Communities book for the last three years.) So my comments may be “about the software” or about its use or about me. The only way out of that conundrum is to keep observing and writing about it. Let’s see.

When I first logged on I was somewhat put off by having to complete yet another profile. Isn’t there a way to bring profile stuff in from somewhere else? And after the conference, is there any way to carry the profile forward? And what about sharing my profile with the rest of the world? I wonder whether the business model for the software company favors captive content and hermetic boundaries where openness may be more useful socially.

Part of creating your profile is to choose from a set of tags that are then used for matching you up with other conference participants. The first two sets are “discipline” and “research interests,” reminding us that this conference is aimed at academic researchers. (It’s an accident of history that I keep going to it, I swear.) The third category of tags is called “Services/Sites”. It’s funny to think that whether someone uses Skype or Flickr not says something about them, rather than whether it’s easy to reach them or not.

Each of the main Instant Messenger types are listed separately (AOL IM is separate from Yahoo IM which is also separate from MSN): what about Trillian users, who can speak to all three?). As I’ve thought about the tag categories it seems to me that push-back and complaints such as this one are an indicator of engagement

.

So the result of all this is a diagram with clickable pins representing people. You can mark them as contacts, send them a message, and look at their profiles. And it does work. Standing right next to me in the diagram is Aldo de Moor, a fellow I met at the Prato Conference last fall. I wrote him. He wrote back with an invitation to submit a book chapter proposal. The conversation has started already.

Although it’s conventional to put “me” at the center, I know that in reality it’s not the case. There are others who are at the center of this particular conference, but IntroNetworks lies and tells me that it’s “me” that’s at the center. I wonder whether it would be more productive to find and show some “us” and “them”? I guess that’s what the “Discipline” and “research interests” tags are really trying to do: get at personal history and participation in specific, learned communities.

Tuesday morning I was on a panel for a breakfast session on Online Social Networking. Breakfast is a pretty nice thing at the The Governor Hotel, so the bottles of red wine that I saw out the corner of my eye seemed really odd. It turned out that the panelists were given a nice bottle of Oregon Pinot Noir at the end of the event. A nice touch.

Justin Garrity, the moderator of the session, set us all up by sending us a list of attributes of great panels at the SXSW Conference in Austin:

1. Relaxed and comfortable
2. Interested in the topic
3. Not hung-over
4. Sense of humor
5. Engaged in a conversation with each other and the audience
6. Puts in the extra effort to try and transform odd audience questions into great audience questions
7. Hang around after the panel is over to answer one-on-one conversations from the audience

It was really remarkable how, during the panel, Justin asked us questions that were surprising and yet played to each speaker’s strengths. Wow. I’d like to be able to do that, too.

I had proposed that we gather session notes and the real-time notes from our phone conference in a Google Docs page. From that we produced a list of tools and tagged some resources that we talked about. I’ll blog about what I had to say shortly.

Yesterday I was talking with a graduate student who’s studying e-coaching — a subject that seemed broad enough that I wanted to define more precisely what kind of coaching interests me:

Coaching a community leader happens through a sustained conversation that is focused on the ongoing leadership practice of one partner (the coachee), drawing upon the experience and background of the other (the coach).

There are several reasons that the definition matters and several points follow from it:

• The “sustained conversation” part is necessary because all of the
  community leader’s practice isn’t visible at once, much less at the beginning. Neither is the context within which
  that practice takes place, partly because leadership always changes the context.
• Ideally, community leaders are expert in the domain of the community they are leading, not in community leadership as such. In fact it’s rare that they want to become expert in the subtleties of community development. So at the beginning of the coaching relationship the most important contribution that a coach can make is to help with “noise reduction” — suggesting which of a myriad of issues can be ignored for the time being. A sense of “the practice of community leadership” may emerge gradually and only over time.
• The topic (or the curriculum) of the conversation is concrete and time-bound — the issues that the coachee is facing at that moment. Therefore coaching needs to be focused on a “live practice” — where the community leader is working with a community that responds to leadership moves, leading to further learning and development.
• Technology comes into the coaching conversation for two reasons. First, because technology plays a part in how we collaborate and have conversations; from that perspective technology is part of the practice. Second, because most communities use technology in one way or another and all of us are learning how to make technology serve our communities rather than allowing technology to swamp or hobble them; from that perspective technology is part of the domain.

I’m noticing that because setting up a blog is so easy, rather than having one blog that serves all purposes, people set up many special-purpose blogs. Here are the blogs I’ve posted to within the last week, each having a special purposes:

• CPsquare News
• CPsquare Education News
• Technology for Communities
• Prato Dialog
• Coaching community leaders (a new one, for a workshop on June 28th in East Lansing, Michigan, as part of the 3rd International Conference on Communities and Technologies)

A consequence of this ease is that abandoned blogs will proliferate in the future.

“Average response” vs. response of the “average person”. The point of using the middle response as a representation of the whole group is that you capture what the person in the middle of the distribution said, without being influenced by the tails (whether positive or negative):

Middle:

• Invigorating. Very interesting dialogue on 3 tensions
• Interesting, topical, relevant and well presented
• Interesting to get another perspective

People were engaged in Nancy’s presentation. They connected with her and with the topic. It’s interesting to to me that none of the responses commented on the fact that audience feedback was being collected in a wiki. Good to see the “3 tensions” from our tech study project mentioned. What people in “the middle” said is the main message.

• Fantastic � her delivery style and encouraging participation by audience was great
• Excellent entertaining presenter. It was good split up into 3 parts with food breaks which gave you a breather and time to refresh yourself

Positive Eighth:

• Comprehensive review of e-learning resources in community environment
• An inspiring speaker � I was a bit disappointed as I had registered my mobile beforehand (via an email) but I didn�t get messages � a very engaging and entertaining speaker

Positive Extreme:

• Fantastic � the best. Excellent speaker
• Absolutely excellent!! Inspiring, informative and innovative

There was a lot of enthusiasm for the session. Seems like quite a bit of variety, ranging from enthusiasm for the topic, for the process (e.g., SMS) and for Nancy herself as as a presenter.

• Ok � food for thought
• Some thoughts and concepts that had not considered before. Great how split into 3 parts
• Food for thought. Good presenter

Negative Eighth:

• Too long � I can�t concentrate that long
• Started well but went on for too long, became boring
• Rather long � not particularly stimulating

Negative Extreme:

• Why do we need an American who is full of herself to tell us what we already dabbled in during our LearnScope projects?
• Long, elitist
• Hard to follow � esoteric. I didn�t warm to her and felt she presented poorly which immediately creates a barrier to an audience (read �me�). She was disjointed in my opinion. Not clear on outcomes.

The quartile comments are actually pretty positive, so you can say that three-fourths of the audience actually had a good experience. The “Negative Eighth” comments all seem to be about length, making me wonder why people stayed, particularly since it sounds like there were breaks where people could have left or stayed in the lobby. Were people being rewarded with “continuing education units” of some sort? The “Negative Extreme” comments stand out so that you might either pay a lot of attention to them or completely ignore them.