A perennial question in supporting a community is how to focus conversations.  How to dig deeper into a topic, explore new perspectives, or move a conversation forward over time.  Those are questions that a community insider may be able to answer but may not be answerable by people who are not members, not involved in [...]

Tags: CHIFOO

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 [...]

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 [...]

I’ve been on the “leadership team” of the Portland ODN more or less continuously for the last 10 years. I’ve found ODN to be a nice face-to-face home professionally, even though my work is very different from what most OD professionals do. But I thought that being on the leadership team would be fun [...]

It’s really great when special-purpose websites are mashed together.  The effect is multiplicative.  For example, Twemes.com, although it has a really ugly pattern for a background, is elegant and simple and combines:

“Tweets” from twitter.com that have a particular hashtag
Photos from flickr.com that have the same hashtag
links from delicious.com that have that same hashtag

Here’s a silly [...]

Tags: flickr, mashups, twemes, twitter

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 communities I work with seem to be using telephone bridges more and more. Those phone bridges are acquiring more features (so I think of them more like a platform with several tools on them rather than simple tools). For example, phone bridge platforms can send email announcements scheduling a call and make [...]

Tags: skype

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 [...]