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 […]

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 […]

During the Council meeting at the Portland Shambhala Center last week, Paul Refalo, the Center’s director observed that he can always give two alternative responses to the question of “How’s the Shambhala Center?” He can say that things are falling apart and that they are just coming together. And he said he could give substantial […]

A dollar is not a dollar: it depends on which stash it’s kept in. Josien Kapma and I have been doggedly working in and around CPsquare on the question of how to put pockets and legs on small online communities for at least a year. By legs, we mean helping communities get places (usually requiring […]

One of the issues around participation in communities of practice is “having enough time.” We challenge people to declare that they have enough time before participating in a CPsquare workshop. But people have always experienced a lot of desire and some disappointment during the Foundations workshop. It seems like there is always more to be […]

In a simpler setting, when we’re launching the Foundations Workshop, for example, I have developed a whole set of heuristics for figuring out when people are engaged and the degree to which they are connecting with the group. Some of the tell-tales I use include: Have they logged on? Have they sent me their picture […]

Our connected futures workshop is off to a good start, I think. The launch phone call went well. For some of us, having a telephone call is very comforting. You feel like there’s a real person on the other end of the line (or in that other corner of the telephone bridge cloud, perhaps?). But […]