Ward Cunningham just recently set up his own channel on YouTube and has edited a conversation we had last Fall.  His philosophy for conducting interviews is simple and effective: make guests feel comfortable and ask them questions that make them look good. He did a great job making me feel comfortable.

We start by talking about how, in writing the book, we tried to not “just” be experts, but to also get at our experience and the more intimate level at which communities live. At the very end I remember to tell him that his interaction with the community that formed on his wiki was one of the first instances where I glimpsed what the role of a technology steward might be about.  It has taken a lot of work to write about “less technical” people might take on the role, but I’m convinced that you don’t have to be a Ward Cunningham to serve your community with respect to its technology needs.

Tags: technology_stewardship

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 need to put it together to get an overview.  In a formal environment all of the complexity would be handled by SQL queries or match-merge operations with tools like SAS (which I grew up on).  In an informal environment, we end up using use tools like spread-sheets (like Excel or Google’s) that allow us to do most of the work until we need to do a match merge.  That means we need to combine data from two sources, matching (joining records) where possible and interleaving where a match doesn’t occur.  Very basic, very boring and error-prone to do by hand.

Until now, using an idea from Phillipp Lenssen, Google Apps Hacks (Sebastopol, CA: OReilly, 2008) http://isbn.nu/9780596515881.  Here’s how you do it, following the idea on page 202.

Open a new google doc:

Insert the unique data (e.g., “the key”) from the one source (preferably sorted):

The typical case is a list of email addresses.  Note that you’d only put the email addresses themselves, not all the other information that you have associated with the email address.

Save it.  Then overwrite it by “selecting all” and inserting the corresponding data from the other source (also sorted) and then save again.

Now, under the “Tools” drop down menu, select “Revision history”,

Check the boxes and press “Compare versions”.  You get this very nice little listing:

The lines that are in one source but not the other are colored and you can easily tell which source they come from.  The lines that match (are in both sources) are black. Now you can go back to your Excel spread-sheet or wherever and do the rest of the process by hand.  It’s much easier to do because you have an easy-to-use listing showing where matches (and mis-matches) occur.

Tags: Googleapps, hacks

I’m working with several meta-communities: communities of practice made up of people who are themselves supporting communities.  Of course CPsquare is very much my “main meta-community” but I’m a bit surprised at how these meta-communities are turning up.  (I guess I shouldn’t be, since that’s where I started 10 years ago working to get a meta-community going at StorageTek.)

Talking about communities of practice can be pretty tricky, straining the patience of the action-oriented folks if it goes on too long and making the analytical types anxious if conversations get too loose.  These communities face a raft of issues about leadership, technology, boundaries, and purpose.  In a couple of these meta-communities I’ve introduced the concept of regular “experiments”, borrowing an idea in Derby and Larsen’s Agile retrospectives. (They aren’t talking about communities of practice, but in a way that’s what their book is about.)  Collective experiments are a useful activity no matter what a community’s domain might be, but with a CoP meta-community the can be especially helpful.

Here are some of the questions that come up in meta communities, all of which are in some way a matter of balancing opposites:

• What exactly are our goals as community leaders?  Is it legitimate to find new goals as we go and if so, how do we do that?  Could we develop richer and more useful frameworks to evaluate our selves and our work?

• If we’re trying to “improve our practice as leaders” we have to figure out what, exactly, our practice is.  How do we do that?  Compared to what other roles do we define ourselves?

• How do we get into the nitty gritty of making comparisons between practices and experiments of different members — so that we dig in enough without getting too personal?

• Can we simultaneously stand inside and outside of our practice?  We want to be critical enough without too much navel-gazing and without getting mechanical about what we’re doing.

The point about experiments is that none of these questions need to be answered in the abstract or “for ever.”  They need to be answered in practice, for the moment.  Swapping stories is obviously a core practice in this kind of work, but that can be too sloppy and too informal.  Charlotte Linde’s discussion about places and occasions for remembering and telling stories suggests to me that “experiments” are a great umbrella to get the right stories out.  Just as Jerome Bruner talks about how the law is all about formalized stories, I think that “experiments” are a nice framework for formalizing stories about community leadership.

From that perspective the whole art of community leadership might come down to providing good occasions for practitioners to remember together what works and what doesn’t.  It applies to meta-communities as well as garden variety communities of practice.

—- References:

Esther Derby and Diana Larsen, Agile Retrospectives; making good teams great (Raleigh, NC: The Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2006) http://isbn.nu/0977616649

Charlotte Linde, Working the Past; Narrative and Institutional Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)  http://isbn.nu/9780195140293

Jerome Bruner, Making Stories; Law, Literature, Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002)  http://isbn.nu/9780674010994

Tags: cpsquare, experiments, meta-cops

IT University lobby during the AoIR 9.0 Conference

CPsquare has a long tradition of holding “sidecar events,” where we meet before or after (and hang out together during) a related conference. In October, we had a sidecar event after the AoIR 9.0 meeting in Copenhagen. The larger conference justifies the effort and expense of travel and gives a smaller (day long) CPsquare event a special focus. Having a CPsquare posse during the conference makes it much more fun and more useful, too. The posse acts as a kind of “search and comment upon” social lens: I find it tremendously useful to have a known set of interacting people debriefing the parallel sessions, even when we all go to different ones.  When many of us go to the same session, like a plenary talk, “the posse” focuses on what was presented over a longer period of time and with more depth than if the group of fellow-attendees were less connected.

One of the plenary sessions at AoIR was Rich Ling’s (http://www.richardling.com/ on “Taken for grantedness of technologies.” He spoke as a sociologist about how a technology becomes so common that it’s taken for granted and thus becomes invisible. At that point someone who doesn’t have access to it becomes a problem or a burden for everyone else. He talked about automobiles and mobile phones as examples. It seems to me that communities like CPsquare and our AoIR posse are a lens that makes technologies visible some of the time and then invisible at other points in time.

I had the opportunity to experience “taken for grantedness” of cell phones first-hand. I didn’t have a mobile phone that works in Europe. It would have been very handy while I figured out the train, metro, and bus system in Copenhagen. But not having one made me kind of a problem for the rest of the group whenever I was lost or late.

There were several ways in which the CPsquare posse was a lens on my ownership of and access to a mobile phone.

• I probably wouldn’t have heard Rich Ling or have started thinking about technology adoption at that society-wide level without CPsquare’s side-car event. As a result I’ve been paying a lot more attention to mobile phone adoption.
• A connection with Thomas Mathiasen through CPsquare (I got to know him in one of the Foundations of CoPs workshops in 2001) made attending the conference more economical and was a great opportunity to get reacquainted. But staying at the Mathiasen household caused me to travel further and more frequently in Copenhagen than the rest of the CPsquare posse, all of whom stayed in the same hotel. Hence more of a need for me to have a mobile phone.
• The reason it didn’t occur to me that I needed a mobile phone was that I’ve observed other CPsquare members who are based in the US, spend far more time than I do in Europe, and seem to get along just fine. Why bother figuring something out when I can just copy the technology adoption behavior of others in my community?
• The posse’s schedule of meeting times and meeting points was constantly under re-negotiation, as people arrived by train or plane or automobile and as individual schedules dictated. Some CPsquare folks didn’t participate in the the AoIR conference at all, some participated for four days running and some just picked a few of the events. The EPIC conference and our CPsquare dialog complicated the schedule. All of that meant that a mobile phone was a necessity.
• Once I was synchronized with the CPsquare folks, I could depend on others for phone contact (we published several mobile phones internally, so that people could request that a locked door be opened, etc.). A mobile phone was indispensable, but I personally did not have to have one.

It seems to me that good wifi connectivity enables posses and networks to form at big conferences, bringing all kinds of social and technical opportunities into focus. I really like it when you can actually see a community participating in a conference on Twitter. (Not just for esthetic reasons, either, because it provides a nice way to pick up useful stuff when people are chatting with each other and you can overhear.) IT University provided pretty good service at the AoIR Conference, although the conference volume was too much for it some of the time. During Rich Ling’s talk, I happened to be sitting next to Shirley Williams and Tim Jordan, who had just given a talk about hackers immediately before the presentation I did with Beverly Trayner and Patricia Arnold. I noticed Shirley gave up tweeting about the plenary talk because the wifi crashed. I managed to buy Tim Jordan’s Hacking: Digital Media and Technological Determinism before I gave up. (That’s a very good read, by the way.)

Last week was the fall vacation for universities in Denmark, so their facilities were used for conferences such as AoIR 9.0 and EPIC 2008.  Many of the people who participated in either conference did not seem to know about the other one, even though to me there were many connections and overlaps. There was a big contingent from CPsquare traveling to Denmark, mostly to AoIR.

Outside the EPIC Conference in Copenhagen
Originally uploaded by xeeliz

Beverly Trayner and I had been corresponding with Gitti Jordan about a CPsquare-sponsored dialog on Sunday October 19, so to get the conversation going we snuck into the EPIC conference to join a workshop she was leading on Mobile Work and Mobile Lives. After we’d looked around to determine whether we could get in, we had a coffee waiting for the conference attendees to finish lunch and talked about billing rates and business models.

Once we had begged to be admitted and had sat down to talk with people, we were surprised and delighted at how welcomed we felt and we both ended up being the reporters for our respective discussion groups. Here’s roughly what I reported on for one of the three groups:

1. Looking at issues such as worker and work mobility, work at a distance and with distant partners as daily practices:
   • We tend to frame these questions at an individual level, at the risk of missing opportunities and problems at the ensemble level.
   • Collaborating and living with people at a distance, across many time zones now seems to be the norm, but it’s also a challenge we can’t quite handle or necessarily understand.
   • We need to look at implications both for “the workplace” as well as for “the home.”
2. Big themes for mobile workers who collaborate at a distance:
   • What does it mean to have roots? Where is home?
   • Is multi-location, multi-time zone work liberating or enslaving?
   • How bound up is our thinking about these issues with our own social status, seeing all these issues as pertaining mainly to “knowledge workers”?
   • Is the germination of powerful ideas still necessarily a co-located, face-to-face event?
   • How can we be so obsessed with purposeful research while relying on serendipitous encounters and surprising discoveries?
   • Can we “stand outside” somehow to understand the importance of “where we live” physically and in terms of the succession of generations?
3. There were all kinds of issues on the edge of our awareness, that fell into two main areas:
   • How can we “study” these phenomena? What is “observation” (can we do it at a distance)? What kinds of scale issues are there?
   • What would the value of insights into these issues be (were we to understand them)?

It was really fun!

Tags: cp2aoir09, EPIC2008

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 practice are so powerful for spreading practice (whether good or bad, whether about technology or not).  Among other things seeing that others in your community are paying attention to something is proof that it’s important.

A few weekends ago I helped design an event that brought together volunteer administrators from Shambhala Centers in the Northwest region.  I had pushed for the idea that the whole day should be focused on sharing administrative, financial, instructional, or technology practices.  It was a great day.

But during afternon the report-outs it was surprising how the people who were in sessions focusing on fund-raising or leadership or schedule coordination had so much more enthusiasm for using technology to do their work than the people we had brought together to talk about technology as such.  I think we didn’t provide enough social proof that technology was relevant to the functioning of a little meditation community.

Tags: tagging

It’s really great when special-purpose websites are mashed together.  The effect is multiplicative.  For example, Twemes.com, although it has a really ugly pattern for a background, is elegant and simple and combines:

• “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!

Tags: flickr, mashups, twemes, twitter

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 by José Sanchez-Lugo, a UPR professor I met in the Connected Futures workshop last May. He and his colleagues are doing fascinating work. They are way beyond the “ills of bestness” that Patrick Lambe describes. When I think of fights I’ve had with program evaluators who are trying to make a community of practice initiative fit into a neat pigeonhole, it’s inspiring to see someone launching a bunch of active communities with the original funding from an evaluation effort. Not only have they developed their reflective practice in areas such as collection development or research support, they’ve cooked up new directions for innovation, such as virtual reference or uses of Second Life.

Here’s Liz Pagán’s report (titled, roughly, “yet another distinguished Puerto Rican” :-).  There is a lot of activity in the various blogs and wikis of the communities launched by this project.  (One great thing about this visit, apart from a couple hours with José himself) was that it gave me the chance to practice my “communities of practice” vocabulary in Spanish a week before a project in El Salvador.  Talk about just in time practice!)

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. Not to be thwarted the book club organizers, Bronwyn Stuckey and Jeffrey Keefer organize a process to figure out who in the community wants to be involved, what general themes are most important to them, and within that, which specific chapters we’re going to read together. Ah, now we can sit down with a deep dive into an excellent chapter about how academics in South Africa adopt new technologies and think about teaching, right? No.

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.

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 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.