Although the whole technology for communities project comes out of our practice with specific communities, during gestation and birthing it’s easy to start worrying about how our thinking may have gotten far removed from actual practice. It’s easy to wonder, “Maybe we’re just talking to each other… (Maybe we’re having too much fun.) Maybe it’s […]

This is a great example of how a new question leads to a little time-saving solution that several people have asked for. Somewhere in CPsquare, Bill Bruck asked: Is there a way to write and bookmark a URL that will allow signgle sign-on to this space? For instance, it might look like:http://conversations.cpsquare.com/?userid=myname&password=mypassword I realized that […]

The mechanics are in place, now for the fun part. I’ve been working on setting up a feed for CPsquare members’ blogs. I just checked it to see whether the feed was working correctly, and it was really spectacular! What an amazing bunch of people and work going on! Of course for the feed to […]

I’ve always thought that technology can boost communities of practice, but almost every tool also creates new boundaries around a community and more complexity for community members. Learning to manage those boundaries is a really important topic for community members, leaders, and sponsors. I’ve been learning a lot about how to create a wider periphery […]

Often a tool’s utility for a community of practice is affected by how it works with other tools as much as how it works by itself. I used to think of phone bridges as free-standing tools, but I’ve come to think of them as a key community resources that needs to fit into a constellation […]

Tags: skype

I listened to Jerry Michalski‘s Yi-Tan call (http://www.yi-tan.com) yesterday. It’s a weekly call about technology and its social consequences. People on the call wouldn’t call it a community of practice, but if you notice, a lot of people on the call are “regulars” that know each other, share in-jokes, can often finish each other’s sentences, […]

Recently I’ve been using a phone bridge that connects both Skype and regular phone users. It’s called High Speed Conferencing and it’s free. There are many free phone bridges out there these days, but having Skype and regular phone users on the same call is very helpful, especially for international communities. In general, the sound […]

The other day, I was rushing to follow up on a planning session with Susan Nyrop, where we preparing for the next session with Steve Denning. I had agreed to send an email to people who were involved in the discussion. But who were they? I had the choice of either sending a message to […]

The Portland Ed Cluster ( http://www.portlandedcluster.com/ ) is a consortium of Portland companies working in the learning / elearning area. It’s a small community of practice that I’ve felt I should connect with, even though what I do seems pretty different from their norm. I’ve been to a couple meetings and hopped on my bike […]

Setting up a blog — getting all the technology right — is a bit of a project, even though I hear tell it’s just the beginning. I’ve been thinking about what to do and how to do it for a couple of months. There are lots of decisions, aesthetic, functional and technical. Not to mention […]