The Fall 2009 Research and Dissertation fest includes nine presentations.  They will cover theory, implementation and evaluation in settings as diverse as healthcare, higher education, and development and countries including Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the US. Our sessions are somewhat informal and open to non-members for a nominal fee.

Healthcare

• Sue Huckson: Research and leadership around emergency health care in Australia 12/10/2009?
• Jim Palmer Qualities of Personal Interaction: the Promotion of Research Utilisation for Quality Improvement in the US Health Care Sector 12/9/2009

Education

• Cynthia Jines: The Role of Communities in the Sustainability of open educational resources in South Africa 12/7/2009
• Bettina Arnum Boyle: Online Tables & Table Cloths: Facilitating Space for Online Learning & Collaboration. 12/10/2009
• Jacquie McDonald: Implementing and Sustaining Faculty Learning Communities/Communities of Practice at Australian Universities 11/24/2009?

Evaluation

• Judy Zorfass: Trace analysis in the evaluation of a system of social service communities of practice 12/4/2009
• Naava Frank: The experience of being evaluated from a community leader’s perspective 11/30/2009
• Joitske Hulsebosch: Monitoring and Evaluation of Knowledge Management Strategies in the Development Context 12/2/2009

Social learning theory

• Etienne Wenger: Communities of practice and social learning systems: the career of a concept 11/23/2009

The schedule is still open to change.  Sessions will combine a synchronous and asynchronous component.  Register now if you are not a member of CPsquare.

When: Monday, November 16, 2009 12:00 PDT 20:00 GMT (your time zone)

Where: SCoPE Community Enthusiasts Elluminate Room

Although we try to make the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop as much not like school as we can, it always seems like some participants refer to it as “a class” and indeed it does have to have some elements of a class.  Like a beginning and an end.

We do try to embed real community-development features into both the beginning and the end of the workshop.  At the beginning of the workshop we invest a good bit of time exposing what a great resource the workshop participants are for our collective learning.  At the end we talk about how the inquiry could continue individually and collectively through participation in CPsquare events.

But we’ve found that when people arrive too late for the beginning of the workshop, their experience really is compromised.  So it’s OK for people to start one or two days late, but if they miss that deadline, they have to wait for the beginning of the next workshop.  That compromised experience is evidence for our claim that the Foundations Workshop is as much about an experience of participation as it is a conversation about the nature of participation and it’s impact on learning.

Unfortunately today I discovered that a setting on our administrative server was set so that it looked like registration was closed three days before the beginning of the workshop, not two days afterward.  It’s now fixed and registration is open for another four days.

Trained as a Water Management Engineer (MSc.) Kapma earned a postdoctoral diploma in Development Management.  She’s the mother of 3 children and an active member of KM4Dev and CPsquare.  In CPsquare, she’s participated in the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop, in the Connected Futures workshop, and been a mentor in the Foundations Workshop as well.

We’ll be shadowing her work as a leader of “Melken Over De Grens” or “Milking on the border” — http://www.melkenoverdegrens.nl.  It’s a global community for expatriate Dutch dairy farmers that’s developing its learning agenda and trying to find its legs at the same time (in terms of organization, business model, funding, and learning activities).

Join us once a month to reflect on the birthing and development process for this community.  We will consider questions such as:

• In what ways is diversity and a global diaspora a resource for a community? In what ways are those characteristics a challenge?
• What individual and group interests are served by the community? How are they balanced?  What leadership is needed and can leaders be compensated for their work, apart from learning as a leadership benefit?
• What activities make sense and what publications are useful in the development process?

I am going to examine what [communities of practice are already there in an academic health care setting] …. or as I suspect the lack of of them… and hopefully determine what those challenges [to their development] are, using an institutional ethnography approach.

I wrote back that …

Detecting silence or absence is huge, and they are only visible with careful ethnographic observation informed by theory. Last week the keynote at the http://epic2009.com conference was Gillian Tett, an anthropologist who ended up working for the Financial Times and noticed that there was an awful lot of silence around the global debt markets in 2007, despite the fact that they were much larger than the equity markets. There were a lot of reasons to not pay much attention to the debt markets at that time. Careful ethnography that paid off in the most unlikely setting.

I can’t resist asking whether you’ve bumped into Charlotte Linde, Working the Past; Narrative and Institutional Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) http://isbn.nu/9780195140293 … a fellow-alum of the Institute for Research on Learning with Etienne. She’s using a vast ethnographic study of an insurance company, she sets up a powerful analytical framework and one of her chapters is about silence and “stories that are not told”… Well worth the read.

Contact with Etienne is an important part of the workshop experience. He’s great to talk to — and he has a great way of sharing access to current practice in many different settings. But it’s also really important to participate in a wider conversation of people who are exploring and applying these ideas in all kinds of settings. The practice of cultivating communities takes more than research.

While I’m at it, I’m hoping you’ve connected with this group (or at least read their stuff). Fung Kee Fung, Goubanova and Crossly are 3 of the authors who’ve all done the Foundations workshop (at one time or another):

http://www.implementationscience.com/imedia/1788022150101911_article.pdf

A final thought: if part of what you’re looking for is absence of communities of practice (partly with a view of suggesting change to enhance learning in a complex system), you need to develop a pretty sensitive eye for the diverse kinds of communities that are fully functional out there. This workshop can’t be the last word on that subject, but it does bust some of the stereotypes that many of us adopted from reading about the “Turbodudes at Shell” in Cultivating Communities of Practice.

Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, and John D. Smith, Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities (Portland, OR: CPsquare, 2009) Book website: http://technologyforcommunities.com ISBN: 9780982503607

It’s been a consuming project for more than 5 years, so it’s really exciting see it come to fruition. (It will be available from Amazon by mid-October, but you can buy a copy now at http://technologyforcommunities.com/buy/).

(I can’t resist recommending a very related book that I’ve been reading recently: Joshua Porter, Designing For The Social Web – http://isbn.nu/9780321534927. It’s aimed at designers and is much more technical than Digital Habitats, but I found it to be very useful.)

Workshops. The next Foundations of communities of practice workshop starts on September 14, 2009 and runs for 7 weeks. If you know anyone who might be interested, please let them know. More information and registration is here: http://cpsquare.org/edu/foundations.

An effort to think through how new community-friendly workshops might be developed has resulted in a public Wiki page that describes what we think it is that works about the Foudations workshop and why. If it inspires or you see ideas missing, it would be great to hear from you about this page: http://cpsquare.org/wiki/Educational_offerings_guidelines_overview. Of course, since it’s a wiki page, you could edit it yourself!

Events and conferences.

For more than a year we’ve been having a conversation in CPsquare about spiritual communities as communities of practice. In our initial exploration it has been remarkable how many challenges they face in common, even though they see themselves as fundamentally different. We are working toward holding a conference of some kind on the subject.

In addition to our semi-annual research and dissertation fests, CPsquare is continuing with its monthly “Shadow the Leader” sessions where we follow the activities of one community leader for an entire year. The first three years of this series have yielded rich insights. We are adding a quarterly series that is being designed as we go. It’s called “Visits to living communities” and our current thinking is on CPsquare’s public Wiki: http://cpsquare.org/wiki/CPsquare_field_trips_project. The events themselves are open to the  public. Part of the idea is to use a conceptual framework to investigate the communities we visit. We are experimenting with the “C4P model” by Hoadley, C. M., and Kilner, P. G. (2005) “Using technology to transform communities of practice into knowledge-building communities,” ACM SIG-GROUP Bulletin, 25(1), 31-40.  (Discussed and elaborated in Alice MacGillivray, “Knowledge Intensive Work in a Network of Counter-Terrorism Communities” from Handbook of Research on Knowledge-Intensive Organizations edited/authored by J. Kociatkiewicz & D. Jemielniak (Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2008).)

Last Wednesday we met with Robert Tollen who was the community leader we shadowed the first year.  We ended up talking about managing community boundaries, about environmental disruptions, leadership responsibilities, and about specific technologies that work with an email list.  A few highlights:

• Tollen has consciously avoided tools like Facebook or Twitter that might be technically challenging for his elderly subscribers
• Volunteers retrieve information from the rather vast list archives to help individuals who ask for help
• Tollen himself uses 16 different email addresses: one to accumulate an archive of the list digests, another to accumulate searches, another for scheduled announcements, etc.
• It’s interesting to hear about the tools that Tollen has found to extend email functionality.  They are not necessarily “hot” but it’s fascinating to see how they are relevant and work in the context that he’s set up. Those tools have now been added to the CPsquare Email list wiki page.

At the end of our visit, Tollen reflected on the benefits of being listened to in the context of our shadow the leader series.  Another 1-minute snippet from the conversation reflects on how the leader benefits from the work of leading a community, too. Both of those comments suggest what our shadow the leader conversations have been like.

Next week we will catch up with Beth Kanter, who is the leader we shadowed in Year 2. She is now a visiting scholar at the Packard Foundation and has just moved to California which she’s been describing here: http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/vlog/ (packing the people, moving the car, checking the cello on the plane, etc.).