A very nice practice that was not emphasized enough in the opening session was having dozens of etherpad rooms configured so that you could easily find where the note-taking should be going on.  Since it’s a wiki page, you could come through afterward and name your session and point directly to the meeting notes.  The session pitching part of the day was a little messier than the Recent Changes Camp because the PA system was a bit flaky and nobody was trying to make the announcement process orderly.  So people did their thing.  In a couple of sessions I was the only one taking notes — the idea of taking notes together seems strange to a lot of people.  That might be worth a little instruction at the beginning of a the day.

I had prepared to do a session on Business Models for communities.  I’ve been thinking about the issue of how communities can get formal enough to have conferences, websites, technology stewards and other staff without loosing their freshness and learning passion for many years now.  Josien Kapma and I have been working on the issue for years and this year’s “shadow the leader” series in CPsquare has focused on her experience with Dutch expatriate dairy farmers.  But I keep having this nagging feeling that there is so much more to the issue.  Maybe there’s a book there.

Anyway, to fish for new ideas and ways into these issues, I went to a copy center and printed the PDF on 3′ by 4′ paper.  Lugging it to the conference and back on a bicycle was not so fun.  The discussion was good: having a big poster-sized canvas was effective because it brought out the unconscious differences in our assumptions.  See the notes on the conference Wiki.  Thanks to Ann Marcus for taking notes during the session.

What was most confusing in the discussion was basic: business model for what?  Some people wanted to talk about a business model for a community entirely sponsored by one company, whether an “inward-facing community” or an “outward-facing community”.  (In this context people are almost always talking about exclusively online communities.)  The tricky thing is that the conversation slipped into one about justifying community to a company that’s asking for an explicit return on investment.  I think a business model exercise is probably part of justifying community-support efforts to a company. But to have a useful conversation in a short period of time (where we didn’t have much time to figure out where each other was coming from ) I had proposed that for discussion we we use the Community Leadership Summit itself as a sample community because that was the context that we all shared at the moment and we all had a bit of information on how things were working.

After I got home I transcribed the really messy text into something that’s more legible.  You can download the PPT here.  The “post-its” can be easily copied and moved around.

In addition to the etherpad resource “rooms” there was supposedly an IRC channel going on.  I could never find it. It seemed to me that there was more of an ensemble note-taking and hanging out scene going on on Twitter using the #cls10 hash-tag.  I still like http://wthashtag.com/Cls10 as a mechanism for capturing tweets during a conference. Once you set up the page, it does a lot of gathering and tracking for you. Great transcript afterward and nice stats, too.

I also ran a session on technology stewardship on the spur of the moment.  That is, I proposed it, facilitated it, took most of the notes, and, according to one participant, talked too much, too.

I thought it was very interesting how some 20-30 people gathered together to help one person figure out how they might move one community “beyond an email list.”  Another reminder that a great way to learn is to try to help someone else.

Face-to-face conferences aren’t what they used to be and that’s ok with me.   How many times have you gone to a face-to-face conference in another city where you rub shoulders with a lot of strangers, listen to a bunch of talking heads with obscure PowerPoint slides in cold dark rooms, make a few acquaintances at the reception, give your talk to a group that may or may not get what you’re talking about, and come home with a printed proceedings that goes on the bookshelf?

My days of passive participation are over and done with:

• For me, the reason to go to a big conference is the small group conversations with people I already know somewhat or with whom I share a common interest
• We have the tools to coordinate and connect before, during and after the event — to keep the conversation going (it starts before the conference and goes afterward as well)

I always want to know who else is attending an event, what they’re thinking about, where people are staying, and where we’re going to eat.  During the conference, it’s useful to eavesdrop on parallel sessions that I’m missing by watching the twitter stream.  And it’s helpful to be able to look at people’s slides right away, and to find related materials that’s mentioned or written during the conference.   And it’s nice to see photos of the event afterward, too.

Tagging before, during and after a conference is a key tool for using a big conference as a kind of host system a smaller group that wants to connect.  The economics of face-to-face meetings leads to big conferences.  The economics of meaning-making require smaller, but not closed, conversations.

Apart from email, forums, teleconferences, mobile phones, and other technologies, tagging is useful for enabling a small group to use a large conference as a platform for its own purposes.  It’s an example of a technology that allows the integration across tools by means of a practice and a protocol (as we discuss in Chapter 4 of Digital Habitats).

Using CPsquare’s “sidecar” participation in the AoIR Conference (which coincided with the EPIC conference) as an example, here are some observations of how tagging can play a role in supporting a subgroup’s participation at a big conference.

• Emergent intention.  Early on nobody knows for sure who will be there and therefore whether it’s worth going.  Email discussions about who’s going are key to establishing that there will be some kind of quorum which would make a long trip worthwhile.  But at a certain point, tagging the resources that emerge is essential.  Four months after tagging the AoIR conference, for example, we noticed that the EPIC conference was scheduled the same week.  That coincidence turned out to be a key to the dynamics of the conversation.
• Fuzzy social boundaries.  Tagging is open in the sense that anybody can use it and it’s visible to everyone. Tagging prospective participants or presentations is a way of encouraging participation.  Looking at the tagstream, for example, you can see that Sus Nyrop, who did participate, was hoping that Christina Costa would join us (although she couldn’t make it in the end).
• Identification of relevant resources .  Being together at a conference may focus on a particular topic, but you have to identify a lot of other relevant resources like where to stay.  We used the lodging page from a previous conference in Copenhagen to figure out where our group might stay.
• Multiple outputs. Active participation generates a lot of different outputs. Tagging is the ideal way to keep track of them.  Delicious links are here. Flickr photos are here.  Not much video produced at that conference.
• Distributed leadership. Although I used the “cp2oir08” tag more than anybody else, others used it as well.  The goal is to coax people to contribute, whether it’s a tag you came up with or not.

Tips

• Propose a tag early.  Announce it by email or by other means to get the word out.
• Tag should be as intuitive and descriptive as it can be but as short as possible.
• Weave tagging into group practice and tagged resources into the conversation.  Mention what’s been tagged by you or what you’ve found in the tagstream that others should know about.
• Think of the tagstream a community-building resource. A tagstream is the accumulation of tagged materials contributed by everyone, which  is stored on a tagging platform such as delicious, and which retrieved or monitored via an RSS feed (but which can also be viewed as a web page).
• Identify related or parallel tags (such as “ir9” that was used for the AoIR conference as a whole on Flickr, delicious, and Twitter).
• Think of the tagstream as an ideal research tool, when you’re going back to figure out what happened or when.

Photo by Bev Trayner.

• 5,000 Watt FADECO radio station
• Small blue “sensor” or integrated circuit audio recorder
• Mobile phones

Of course the key to making all of this work is the network of people around his project in terms of friends and collaborators, farmers who participate via recorded interviews or mobile phones.  (A lot of stories about innovation in Africa were floating around my head from the special report on telecoms in emerging markets in the September 24th 2009  issue of The Economist: Mobile marvels).  One thing that was striking about Sikeku’s project is that it’s sustainable because it’s so local, so passion-driven, and has a long time horizon.  Not that external help wouldn’t make a difference, but it’s important that his project that’s not donor-controlled.  Its beginning and end is not timed by an external donor.  Here’s a 7 minute interview:

Sikeku’s story got me to thinking about the polarities that we discuss in Chapter 5 of Digital Habitats:

• Radio broadcasts are a remarkable technology for bringing people together across great distances.  It’s so prevalent as to be unremarkable.
• But radio is a very group-oriented tool, so tools like an audio recorder or a mobile phone pull the community’s configuration toward the individual end of the polarity.
• An audio recorder supports the asynchronous side and the mobile phones (either as audio devices or for text messages) support the synchronous.

It seemed to me that the technologies that Sikeku mentioned all balance each other nicely when you consider that we developed these polarities studying communities that are quite different from his. That’s one of the exciting things about this project: finding out whether the ideas we’ve developed apply (or can be extended to) very different settings.  And the final question: will these ideas be useful?

I captured the interview on a little Flip camera, since I’ve been exploring video and social reporting for the last several months.  I used the interview the very next day in a “huddle session” about technologies and local development, gathering a small group around my laptop to look at the video, without editing or uploading it anywhere (there wasn’t really enough reliable bandwidth to upload a video file at the conference).  The huddle conversation had been difficult because of all the different meanings and instances of “technology,” of “local,” and of “development.”  But having one instance to focus on helped the conversation get much more concrete and much more productive.  A conference on the role of media in the agricultural and rural development that’s running right now suggests just how much is going on out there in this area, so the benefits of being able to focus on Sikeku’s specific case make sense.

The next day we had an open space session on business models for learning communities.  Sikeku participated in the discussion, which tied some of the issues from his experience to other examples where donor funding for a community had turned out to be quite problematic.  At the end of that, Sikeku remarked to me, “As a result of these conversations, I don’t feel so isolated.”  That was very gratifying.

(Cross-posted to our Digital Habitats blog at http://technologyforcommunities.com.)

Yesterday I noticed an interesting webinar format that solves one of the persistent boundary and participation problems that I see with this kind of software. Intronetworks held a webinar on “community management as a job.” I was late to the presentation, so when the GoToMeeting screen first came up, the first thing that caught my eye was that Twitter IDs were used to identify the speakers:

Like many such webinars, the audio channel was the main thing.  But I realized that a twitter stream with the hashtag “introchat” was the main visual. There were some slides, but visually the audience was asking questions, making comments, inviting others into the session. In the course of an hour there were almost 500 tweets. Huge audience participation relative to what the sages on the stage were offering.

It felt like the beginning of a community of practice of community managers. At least a drop-in jam session of one.

Two years ago I wrote about the Intronetworks software and was kind of critical about the hard boundaries between “inside” and “outside” their application here and here. (That may be because people want those boundaries, however.)  Interesting to see them innovate by using webinar software in such an open way.

Outside the EPIC Conference in Copenhagen
Originally uploaded by xeeliz

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

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

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

It was really fun!

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/

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.

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.)

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.

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.