R is not just software.  It’s actually a global organism that grows information: insights, discussions, work methods, human relationships, and open questions as well as a massive amount of software and all the resources that document or support it.  Cesar Hidalgo equates growing information with “computing”, claiming, “It is the growth of information that unifies […]

Here are two handy Perl scripts that I’ve developed, one of them some years ago and the other a few weeks ago.  This zip file perl-scripts-prp-and-csplit contains a “readme.txt”, the Perl scripts and sample input files. The prp.pl script scoops up many files and does many global search and replace edits in place using character strings in […]

It has been a while in coming! People have been asking about an e-book version of Digital Habitats since it was published almost 3 years ago! It seems logical, given that technology is a central theme of the book. Especially when it’s been assigned as reading in a class or workshop and people have scruples […]

You probably already know that Skype is a great tool – especially for community leaders. If you are a technology steward, you’ve got to know how to use it and talk about it, too. To really talk about how to use a tool we’ve got to talk about all the buttons and about the user’s […]

Tags: chat, skype

In considering whether to take the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop, a PhD student in the healthcare field wrote asking whether the workshop would be useful to her, given what she was doing: I am going to examine what [communities of practice are already there in an academic health care setting] …. or as […]

Tags: cpsquare, foundationsworkshop

Yesterday someone on the staff of the Inter-American Development Bank asked an interesting question on com-prac: Could you please share with me what the practices (and or policies) regarding the “housing” of CoPs in your organizations are?  Do you house them outside the firewall of your organization?  Does your organization endorse officially this external sites […]

My work as a tech steward and community leader involves dealing with a lot of little sets of data that comes from different sources.  As our communities live on more and more different platforms, for example, it becomes a messier and more complicated job to keep track of who’s on which platform, and we often […]

Tags: Googleapps, hacks

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 […]