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).

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.

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.

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.

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 and give me a view of how a professional community organizes itself over time. It’s been a great opportunity to observe the ups and downs of a community without having to take on an inordinate amount of work.

ODN has been a meeting-oriented community in that it mainly existed on the 2nd Wednesday of the month for a stand-up presentation (with some schmoozing before and afterwards). Moving beyond a flip-chart was a significant shift. The battle to spend money on a website which now serves as a professional directory is now a distant memory. All along, the presentations have been interesting but ad hoc, depending on what people wanted to present more than on an articulated learning agenda. For a while I tried to get people to participate in a note-taking practice so that the questions, answers, and general discussion could be published afterwards. OD folks in general are not early or enthusiastic adopters of technology: often they are the ones who will see technology as getting in the way — between people.

For many years Miriam Lange kept pushing the “Community Consulting Project” (CCP) idea. She just wouldn’t let it die, although many people on the leadership team (including me) didn’t quite get it. The idea was to provide OD consulting services to non-profits who could not pay. It was somewhat independent of the community’s main activities, but with the leadership of Dan Vetter chugged along year after year, giving people new to the field a chance to work with more seasoned professionals and it provided an important kind of public service.

A little more than a year ago the ODN leadership team decided that it needed some support from “outsiders” and asked the CCP folks to pull together a team to help ODN itself. The CCP team, led by Ed Warnock, met with the Leadership Team and did a survey of ODN members and the members of “adjacent” professional communities. The CCP then led the leadership team through a standard kind of “in search of excellence” process, inspired by Jim Collins: focus on what you can uniquely do, disregard the irrelevant activities, identify those middle areas that can be done minimally.

There were two major meetings that I recall. One was a large, four-hour-long carefully scripted meeting with PowerPoint slides that looked at the survey data results and set some priorities. It turned out that the CCP idea was the core on which ODN wanted to build its future, its key differentiator.  The bottom line: ODN would become the best place for interactive learning about the practice of OD. Later there was a much smaller leadership team meeting that took those priorities and tried to put it all in practice.

Based on the program announcements and the sessions I have attended since then, Jerry Zygmuntowicz, as the program chair, has done an amazing job of implementing the change and orientation, making ODN a much more practice-oriented professional association.  That’s really hard to do.  It’s really impressive that the ODN community has pulled this off.  Here are a few characteristics of the process that were outstanding:

• Recognizing that a change was needed: it is far too easy for a community to just drift into irrelevance.
• Gathering information from the community’s environment in a disciplined fashion.
• Focusing the leadership group’s attention on the challenges that the community needed to face. The leadership team more or less put itself in the hands of some good consultants.
• Lack of conflict in the leadership team, so that nobody stood in the way of moving along “the way forward” that emerged in the process.

But here’s another community development principle: one thing leads to another. I just got invited to meet with a group that’s working on extending ODN’s CCP model to provide some support to for-profit organizations!

• “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 example:

http://twemes.com/tlapd08

It turns out that the combination of those three special-purpose sites is very nice for supporting events, whether face-to-face or otherwise, allowing a group of people who agree on a tag to combine messages and resources on the fly.  Here’s a more serious example, where a lot of people at a recent Community 2.0 Conference in Las Vegas used it to share resources and for back-channel chatting during the conference:

http://twemes.com/c20

It’s a bit of a problem that a short tag like “c20″ because it can have different meanings to different people, so that one person’s use of the tag can be remarkably different from another’s.  But it’s even more of a problem that for some reason Twemes seems to have only one-fourth of the tweets with a given hashtag.  That’s my count with the silly “Talk Like A Pirate Day” tag. At this point Twemes has 4 tweets, while the same tag (without the photos or delicious links) on Twitter’s own search site has 13.  I would rather have Twitter be transparent and let others do the mashing!

It turns out it’s even more complicated. A synchronous read is a wonderful idea but to actually make it happen takes a huge amount of effort. Fortunately, in this case, all the organizers are doing an amazing amount of work. And that includes the book editors, too — evidence that Chris Kimble, Paul Hildreth and Isabelle Bourdon love their (and our) topic.

Both the public discussion and the back-channel is filled with all kinds of little efforts, arrangements and negotiations to make sure that everyone has the books in hand on time. How can you deal with the Danish taxman? How’s mail delivery in Kenya? Who can help? Could the publisher do anything? Does the publisher have any responsibility or interest in the matter? Could we somehow find a work-around? What are the constraints?

Well it’s not all worked out yet, but it makes me stop and think: where does the real community work start and end? Isn’t all the angst around getting the stupid book in people’s hands a really important part of a community’s learning? And don’t all those email threads that are now getting longer and longer say something really important about CPsquare’s values? I think so.

It says something about how people care about each other’s individual learning and our collective inquiry. And I don’t think that’s at all trivial.

In this day and age, when so many forums on a favored topic are sold as communities of practice, it’s cool to see people doing the work of convening and cultivating communities without using the name but all the learning vigor imaginable. These agile retrospectives seem to use very little technology in their interactions (apart from flip-charts and yellow stickies), even though the expected members are very technology-literate.

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.