Every month for the last year, CPsquare members have gathered together to talk with Robert Tollen, the leader of a distributed health support community named MPD-Support-L. It’s like “Grand Rounds” in that world-class diagnosticians show up on the call, but the conversations benefit everyone, not just the patient, who is remarkably healthy.

I heard about Robert Tollen through a friend whose father-in-law had been helped by the MPD-support-L list before he died from one of the several rare blood diseases known as myeloproliferative disorders. Although Tollen wasn’t sure what exactly what we wanted or why, he generously agreed to participate. In the end he said that the monthly telephone conference calls were a “terrific experience” for him and they certainly were for us, too. At first he thought he wouldn’t have anything to say, but it turned out that he had a lot to say, like most good leaders of successful communities.

I thought of the “Grand Rounds” format because many of the conversations in CPsquare are inherently problem-oriented. They focus on challenging situations that demand immediate, short-term help, where a community is being launched, is experiencing growing pains, or is dealing with new technologies. And after several years in existence, CPsquare needed to focus on a healthy community – and in greater depth – as its life played out over a longer period of time. It’s interesting to note that Sir William Osler, considered by many to be the father of modern medicine, invented “Grand Rounds” at Johns Hopkins and lent his name (“Osler-Vaquez disease”) to polycythemia vera, one of the several myeloproliferative diseases.

It’s hard to say everything we learned from the experience. (It’s not hard to see why “Grand Rounds” is described as an important ritual of medical education.) First of all, there’s something very useful about being in regular contact with someone like Robert Tollen, who is so generous of his time in helping people cope with a disease that’s complex and sometimes life-threatening. Second, it’s remarkable how deeply involved a community leader can be in the domain issues of a community of practice: I remember noticing in one of our conversations how very many topics led right back to the scientific intricacies of diagnosis and treatment. Third, it’s remarkable how many little technical pieces work together to support the MPD-Support community.

The MPD-Support list has about 2500 subscribers and is open to patients, family members, and health professionals: http://members.aol.com/mpdsupport/ . It’s been running since 1994 and has members from 41 different countries. A priest in his 30’s who had one of the MPD diseases used the list to find that more advanced medical care for the disease was available in Italy, compared to where he lived in Australia, so he got a job in the Vatican. A 16-year old girl in the UK heard about the choices that others who had taken a hard look at their situations had made. And in the thousands of messages over the years, Tollen balances the various needs that people have to talk about vitamins, herbs, home remedies, and other alternatives while staunchly supporting a scientific approach to medicine that Osler would certainly applaud. It turns out that Tollen receives and circulates information about scientific discoveries related to MPD before it comes to the attention of all but the most specialized hematologists around the world.

There are many facets to any given community. Each participant in the calls seemed to bring out another one: Joitske Hulsebosch from The Netherlands, with an international development perspective; Sherry Spence, an epidemiologist from Colorado; Derek Chirnside, an instructional innovator from New Zealand; Etienne Wenger, a writer of books on communities of practice who asks very good questions; Sandra Walden Pearson, a social change agent from Australia. There were many others, whose names escape me, who helped reveal a very rich world inhabited by a retired man in Florida who’s figured out what works for his community.

Although an email list has been the backbone for the MPD-Support community since it graduated from a distribution list 12 years ago, Tollen uses a surprising array of auxiliary tools to support his community. In an “always on” Web 2.0 world of Frappr maps, it turns out there are a lot of email-based tools to send reminders (www.memotome.com), alerts (e.g., Google), etc. A real-life community is likely to depend on many different tools.

Where does an active support list like Tollen’s lead? Suddenly Tollen is speaking to physicians and researchers at a conference, he’s compiling a list of 400 frequently asked questions, he’s conducting the most detailed survey of people who suffer from the MPD diseases, and for the first time he may just be giving voice to a community with an “orphan disease,” which fortunately makes for a very interesting dozen episodes of CPsquare’s “Grand Rounds.”

Last week at the SAO session on Online Social Networking I kept suggesting that to think about social networking and organizations, you should start by thinking about your teen-agers. Mind you there were not many teen agers in the audience that morning — its was mostly digital immigrants who are parents of teen-agers. My assumption was that everyone was starting from a question like, “How can I add social networking technologies to my website — or bolt them on to what my company offers?”

I thought a more useful question would be, “What kinds of relationships between an organization and a network can social networking technologies enable?” Most of the conversation shifted to talking about communities, not social networks, emphasizing the programmer communities that Intel supports rather than the looser networks of Classmates.com.

So here’s the pitch: instead of thinking about how to bolt technology onto your website, think about your relationship to your teen-ager — and then about how your teenager uses technology. Communities of practice are much like teenagers in that they are inventive, but uncannily conservative; independent but also needing support; open but also smart about spotting the fake.

Just like it’s a waste of time to think about teen-agers in general because they come in so many different sizes and shapes, so are communities different and you should think about the community you have or want before wondering what technologies they might want. Consider how different teen-agers are, depending on their family context (nuclear vs. extended families, big vs. little ones, blended ones, etc.). Consider teen stereotypes, such as “jocks,” “soces,” and “geeks.” Different teen-agers will want to use different technologies in their daily lives and so will different communities.

Finally, consider how teen-agers themselves relate to the technologies in their lives. Providing technology for them with a, “Here… use this!” kind of message is not the most auspicious beginning for a new relationship. Consider how teen-agers are able to straddle two or more technologies at a time, or how they leap from one to another. Communities are the same. Consider how teen-agers are able to re-purpose technologies for new uses; again, communities are just as creative.

Bottom line: respecting a young person goes a long way. Some support is helpful, but a flush and splendid free ride may create some bad habits. Some jointly negotiated performance expectations are useful, but too many goals and deliverables can take the fun out of growing up. All those things apply to communities of practice, too.

Tuesday morning I was on a panel for a breakfast session on Online Social Networking. Breakfast is a pretty nice thing at the The Governor Hotel, so the bottles of red wine that I saw out the corner of my eye seemed really odd. It turned out that the panelists were given a nice bottle of Oregon Pinot Noir at the end of the event. A nice touch.

Justin Garrity, the moderator of the session, set us all up by sending us a list of attributes of great panels at the SXSW Conference in Austin:

1. Relaxed and comfortable
2. Interested in the topic
3. Not hung-over
4. Sense of humor
5. Engaged in a conversation with each other and the audience
6. Puts in the extra effort to try and transform odd audience questions into great audience questions
7. Hang around after the panel is over to answer one-on-one conversations from the audience

It was really remarkable how, during the panel, Justin asked us questions that were surprising and yet played to each speaker’s strengths. Wow. I’d like to be able to do that, too.

I had proposed that we gather session notes and the real-time notes from our phone conference in a Google Docs page. From that we produced a list of tools and tagged some resources that we talked about. I’ll blog about what I had to say shortly.

Yesterday I was talking with a graduate student who’s studying e-coaching — a subject that seemed broad enough that I wanted to define more precisely what kind of coaching interests me:

Coaching a community leader happens through a sustained conversation that is focused on the ongoing leadership practice of one partner (the coachee), drawing upon the experience and background of the other (the coach).

There are several reasons that the definition matters and several points follow from it:

• The “sustained conversation” part is necessary because all of the
  community leader’s practice isn’t visible at once, much less at the beginning. Neither is the context within which
  that practice takes place, partly because leadership always changes the context.
• Ideally, community leaders are expert in the domain of the community they are leading, not in community leadership as such. In fact it’s rare that they want to become expert in the subtleties of community development. So at the beginning of the coaching relationship the most important contribution that a coach can make is to help with “noise reduction” — suggesting which of a myriad of issues can be ignored for the time being. A sense of “the practice of community leadership” may emerge gradually and only over time.
• The topic (or the curriculum) of the conversation is concrete and time-bound — the issues that the coachee is facing at that moment. Therefore coaching needs to be focused on a “live practice” — where the community leader is working with a community that responds to leadership moves, leading to further learning and development.
• Technology comes into the coaching conversation for two reasons. First, because technology plays a part in how we collaborate and have conversations; from that perspective technology is part of the practice. Second, because most communities use technology in one way or another and all of us are learning how to make technology serve our communities rather than allowing technology to swamp or hobble them; from that perspective technology is part of the domain.

I’m continuing to use High Speed Conferencing as a phone bridge because it combines Skype and POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) as I described here. The economics of communication shape how communities get together: many of the groups I work with include some people who can’t participate without Skype and others who can’t participate unless it’s POTS. So even when there seems to be a lot of noise to contend with, this kind of hybrid Skype/POTS bridge is necessary.

Coping with noise on the line. For most of us a POTS call has high fidelity and doesn’t hurt our ears. But even the highest-cost phone bridge is subject to unexpected and uncontrolled noise (as when one of the callers puts the call “on hold” and subjects everyone else to a musical interlude that essentially ruins the call because typically you can’t figure out who’s goofed). I find that one-to-one Skype calls are more variable in terms of noise than POTS, but when some of the callers on a phone bridge are calling in with Skype, the chances are that at some point you will have crackling, echoes, and other noisy irritations. Therefore it’s very nice that the mute functions in the High Speed Conferencing web control page now work correctly:

The Skype names on this page are usually recognizable, even when a participant is a relative stranger. The phone numbers, however, are masked in the same way as caller-id numbers are on your regular phone. Having a handle for each line (a nickname, or even a national flag like the one that the Skype Firefox extension inserts on a page) would be very helpful for managing the noise.

Occasionally there is one line that’s noisy. If you mute everyone, the host can then progressively un-mute each caller until the noisy line is identified (and then switch the noise-maker on and off as needed).

On one recent call, for example, there were many noisy lines, so I found myself muting everyone except the one or two speakers. Guessing who needs to speak next means that the host has to really be in tune with the flow of conversation. It’s inherently clumsy, unless you have a chat going where people can raise their hands, pose questions, or explain that they’ve fallen off the Skype call.

I’m upgrading to a “premium account,” which has two important features: 1) the phone bridge can do its own recording (which is important for people who miss a call); and 2) supposedly callers can “raise their hands” by pressing a key on their keypad even when they’ve been muted (I haven’t found this to work from Skype yet).

I’m also happy with the email that you get after a call:

It’s helpful for weaving a phone call back into the a-synchronous life of a community. I always think that the length of the call for each participant is useful information when you need to be thinking about who was there and who wasn’t. Unfortunately, in this little report the Skype names are replaced by a string of numbers, so for large calls it’s hard to work out who was actually there unless you kept a screen-print from the control panel.

Tags: skype

I’m noticing that because setting up a blog is so easy, rather than having one blog that serves all purposes, people set up many special-purpose blogs. Here are the blogs I’ve posted to within the last week, each having a special purposes:

• CPsquare News
• CPsquare Education News
• Technology for Communities
• Prato Dialog
• Coaching community leaders (a new one, for a workshop on June 28th in East Lansing, Michigan, as part of the 3rd International Conference on Communities and Technologies)

A consequence of this ease is that abandoned blogs will proliferate in the future.

Joitske tagged me. It looks like a pyramid scam in the sense that I’m supposed to pass it on, but I’ll play. Decided to write about 5 jobs I had while growing up in Puerto Rico. In chronological order:

• I was a stock room clerk for a summer at Ryder Memorial Hospital central stores, at the time a 35 bed missionary hospital where my father was the medical director. Central stores was a one man operation in the late 50’s, so my job was to be the assistant to don Juan Santos, a very religious man. We received and filled orders for the whole hospital, including the kitchen (with familiar things like onions, breadfruit and plantain) and the operating room (with things made by exotic-sounding companies like Merck or Johnson & Johnson, etc.). I did get paid something, but it was definitely a political appointment.
• I got a paper route, delivering the San Juan Star and El Mundo. At that time newspapers were mostly sold on the streets by urchins calling out the headlines, and home delivery was an innovation. Also it was a bit subversive for a doctor’s son to have a job like that because status boundaries in Puerto Rico were very rigid. I was probably in junior high, so carrying papers from home on the Ryder Hospital grounds to the other end of town was the 3rd round trip walk each day (my brothers and I always walked home for lunch). On the way back I’d sometimes see my father driving to the US Post Office at the far end of Humacao after completing his morning rounds.
• I attempted to launch a lawn-mowing business, as front lawns were starting to appear in middle-class houses. I made arrangements with the owner of a new house about a mile down Calle Font Martelo and trundled the lawn mower down to her house. The lawn had never been mowed and was very bumpy, so the first mowing was a bit rough. Still, I figured the money was going to be good. Unfortunately, my father saw me and scolded me for using it because the lawn mower was “hospital property.” The fact that he mowed the large lawn around our house even though there was a gardener was just another example of how he behaved according to the customs in his home town of Westerville, Ohio. The failure to launch was vivid.
• Just before I went off to the states, I got a summer job through some connections that my girl-friend’s father had. It was working in the shipping department of a factory that we’d now call a maquiladora. It involved commuting to Naguabo, which was really far away (10 miles?) for that time in Puerto Rico, and “the connections” also provided access to a transportation pool where one worker would drive and 5 of us would all chip in to ride with him. It was interesting to notice that the walkie talkies that we were shipping were all going to exotic places like Saudi Arabia, the Congo, and Viet Nam. A glimpse of a much larger world, full of conflict.
• During a break in my college years, I was living at home in Puerto Rico and got a job in a car repair shop about a block from the Escuela Ana Roque elementary school I’d gone to, working for a father / son operation (Pedro and Papito Matojo). Matojo was not their real name, but they went by that, suggesting that their business was set up in the underbrush. I once did a painting of the view from the work area where we patched cars with “bondo.” (We used all kinds of products from the US, with their names fully naturalized into Spanish. Only now do I realize that “bone-dough” was based on the English word for “bond.”) Across the Humacao River was a housing development created after a horrible flood in the 1956.
  

I’m not really sure I want to keep this meme alive, but I would be interested in knowing more about John G�tze, Martin Roulleaux-Dugage, Jerry Michalski, Marshall Kirkpatrick, and Steve Dale. I may not have been reading their blogs carefully enough — they may have been tagged already!

I’m going to put a copy of CWToolkit in the free code library at Web Crossing. It’s a suite of integrated programs that I’ve developed over the past five years, mainly in CPsquare and in the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop. Although I haven’t gone through and removed all the copyright notices inside each file of source code (nothing is ever so simple, is it?) it’s going to be there as soon at Sue Boettcher lets me know how to share it. In the meantime, there’s a copy of all the source code here and more information about the package here.

It was a wonderful feeling to just install it for a client a couple weeks ago without haggling about the $1,450! I was changing their registration system and they’d only bought the package for one of their several Web Crossing platforms. Doing work on the platforms that didn’t have CWToolkit was always such a hassle. This time I just installed CWToolkit in a matter of 10 minutes and used it. It saved me so much time!

An important question that frames many others in evaluating an event is “How long is our collective ‘now’?” or, in other words, are we evaluating a one-off event that’s over and done with or are we evaluating a moment in the course of a longer relationship?

There are risks when you assume that the context is a longer relationship than is really the case. People may be offended by the assumption or its apparent consequences. At the CIRN conference in Prato last October, Patricia Arnold, Beverly Trayner and I appeared to be assuming too much familiarity.

But it occurs to me that one of the issues in the feedback people were giving to Nancy White was that they were assuming that there was no future relationship involved. But one of the ways that technology changes face-to-face events is that it allows for relationships to begin sooner and continue later. (And that holds both for relationships between the “audience” and the speaker as well as within the group of people formerly known as “the audience.” So I would add to Nancy’s suggestions in onlinefacilitation that asking people whether and to what extent their connections with each other developed in a face-to-face event (conference, workshop, or meeting) is something that’s important to include.

Finally, Nancy White, Etienne Wenger and I agreed on a simple definition of the term “technology steward”:

Technology stewards are people with enough experience of the workings of a community to understand its technology needs, and enough experience with technology to take leadership in addressing those needs. Stewardship typically includes selecting and configuring technology, as well as supporting its use in the practice of the community.

(See more articles on technology stewardship.)

Where does the definition come from? Why do we define it that way? Well, there’s a long(er) and a short(er) answer. The shorter answer is that Beth Kantor prompted us. A slightly longer answer is illustrated by how it came to be that Nancy, Beth and I are posting something about it within hours of each other. Originally there was a discussion on Nancy’s blog, which resulted in some email back and forth between Nancy and Beth. Then Etienne and I got added to the email thread. Nancy and I iterated. Etienne chimed in from Ljubljana (the capital of Slovenia). Then we agreed to post about it. Magic?

One reason that I thought we needed to define the role was that I kept noticing that somehow communities have unwritten rules about when to take a discussion to the back-channel, when to go public, when to iterate, and when to stop, even when the technologies they are using are changing all the time. There seems to be some stewarding going on (in some communities) that results in unwritten rules or practices that are productive. This stewarding is taking place at a smaller scale than what a software designer or vendor would likely notice (or certainly talk much about).

But nobody wakes up spontaneously and says to themselves “I’m a technology steward!” Do we really need the role, much less a definition of it? That leads to a slightly longer story. It seemed to me that one of the purposes for our “tech study” was to explore ways of talking about technology from a community perspective, rather than the perspective of technology creators or enthusiasts alone. I had a gut feeling that it would be really useful. Part of the discipline of doing that would be to talk about the knowledge we were uncovering (or making up in some cases) as situated. There needed to be someone to know what we were talking about and that ended up being “a technology steward.” Of course once the name emerged, I think we all started to see technology stewards. Is this just an ontological trap – tech stewards exist just because we made up a name?

Well, I see myself as a technology steward and Nancy and Etienne have played that role in many different circumstances, too. It was really cool when Bev Trayner explained in a recent email about just how she goes about being the tech steward for communities that are forming. As I think about my coaching practice, technology stewardship plays a role, if only to make sure that technology is not a barrier for the communities that my coachees are leading.

I think that, as communities rely on technology more and more to be and learn together, and as they have more and more choices, the role of technology steward is going to be more important. We need a way to talk about the role.