We’re inventing a new portmanteau.  A Stackathon is working party that’s slower-paced than a hackathon and more reflective.  It gathers useful examples of something with a lot of sense-making built into the process.  Therefore a stackathon is not like the current craze for content curation.  Read on for details about CPsquare’s first Stackathon.

During this stackathon we’ll gather profiles and portraits of as many living Ning-based or Ning-supported communities as possible.  We’ve started developing a list of interesting examples.  As we stack these communities one on top of another, we expect to discover new hacks that could make any of them more effective, sustainable, and fun. (And those hacks are probably relevant to simpler or more elaborate platforms than Ning, too!)

We will try to be somewhat systematic in describing how Ning is configured for each community and how it fits in the community’s digital habitat. We’ll pay attention to the ongoing role of leadership, facilitation, and technology stewardship. That means understanding what the community is about, what kinds of activities are typical, and what other tools a community uses in each community. Understanding that would give us a better idea of how and when to recommend Ning. Our stack will also suggest many possible methods that one community could borrow from another (including the use of auxiliary tools, plug-ins, themes, membership restrictions, etc., etc.).

During the stackathon (which will run for a whole year, from March 2012 to April 2013) we’ll have discussions in CPsquare’s Web Crossing site (password required: it’s for CPsquare members and people registered for the Stackathon), we’ll collect ideas in various Google Docs, we may have teleconferences, and we will collect some of our insights on CPsquare’s Media Wiki site. It all depends on what people want to do and are willing to do.

You can participate in the stackathon by joining CPsquare or by registering for the Stackathon here (costs $10). Any Stackathon registrant who contributes a full community portrait gets their registration fee refunded and they receive a CPsquare membership during the last 6-months of the Ning Stackathon.

(Thanks to Amboo Who for the photo!)

The expansive and emergent conversations that make up our workshop are (almost) as messy as a community, and because we wanted to demonstrate in the workshop how communities deal with these real-life issues, we’ve been experimenting with the idea of “weekly reifications,” showing a range of memory practices that take more or less effort and show different dimensions of “being together” in a community of practice.  Here are some that we have tried recently (the “community logic” is on the left, a snapshot is in the middle, and a note about how it is relevant in the workshop is on the right):

A participant or member directory or roster is something that most community platforms provide. Drawing a ring around a group of people is an easy but meaningful way of suggesting group identity: it can show who was present, who involved in a project, conversation, or event.		When we put roster information in a “take-away” form, it’s available to participants after the workshop is over.   Easy to produce and an important resource.
Looking at a group as if it were a community of practice and wondering what would be helpful to do is a key community development step.  Apart from the insights that a social network analysis can generate, there’s something about getting a group to look at itself in a different mirror (or in several alternative mirrors and from different angles).		I use the group dynamics in the workshop to illustrate how social structure matters.  These graphs take me a bit more effort and skill to produce, but it can generate powerful insights.
A wordle summary is a well-known way of showing what words were important in a conversation.  It tends to mark the close of a conversation, so best not to post the wordle in the midst of a conversation you hope will continue.		Etienne produces a thematic summary of one of the conversations he has facilitated. The wordle is cheap and easy but nowhere near as interesting as what Etienne writes up.
Often it’s the sub-group conversations that end up having a big impact on a community: making these side-conversations visible and bringing their insights to wider view can be partly automatic and partly deliberate.		When participants go off in weeks 4 and 5 to work on projects, Bronwyn makes them visible as groups and highlights the results of their efforts.
Ward Cunningham says, “unfinished is good news for communities.” Scrutinizing a polished text can be a surprisingly refreshing community activity.		Having a discussion of about one of his relatively polished essays with Etienne through the comments feature in Google Docs is a refreshing alternative to our standard discussion platform.
As Beverly Trayner-Wenger said years ago about a CPsquare conversation, “The tangents tend to lead back to the main point.” A community’s URL cast-offs, when organized, can be of high value.		People who participate in the Foundations Workshop bring a tremendous amount of prior knowledge.  Just collecting and organizing the references that come up in conversation is a remarkable resource.

Stay tuned. We make up or borrow new reifications and some fall away depending on participant interest and on the amount of time we have to play with.  Each workshop is different.

Our long-running (almost venerable but still fresh) Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop is running two times this year. It starts next on April 9th and later in the year starting on October 22. If you or someone you know is interested in a deeper understanding of communities of practice, please register or get in touch now!

Social artistry

In a way, social artistry has been at the very core of our conversations, conferences, and workshops at CPsquare for the past 10 years. Recently CPsquare members Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner posted an essay on their new website that Etienne wrote about “social artists” several years ago, reflecting on work that they had done together on an EU initiative.

“One of the key ingredients [in successful social learning spaces] is the energy and skills of those who take leadership in making it all happen. I call the people who excel at doing this “social artists.”

“Social artists are leaders, but the kind of leadership they exercise is subtle. It does not engender or depend on followership. Rather it invites participation. It is a mixture of understanding what makes learning socially engaging and living the process yourself. It is not a formula; it is creative, improvised, intelligently adaptive, and socially attuned.

“By helping people come together and discover their own learning citizenship, social artists build up the learning capability of social systems…. Still social artists tend to be invisible because we do not have good frameworks and language to appreciate their contributions…. Their role is of utmost importance. We need to learn to recognize, support, and celebrate their work. Their contribution is especially critical today when humankind faces unprecedented challenges that will place increasing demands on our ability to learn together.”

Wenger, E. (2009) Social learning capability: four essays on innovation and learning in social systems. Social Innovation, Sociedade e Trabalho. Booklets 12 — separate supplement, MTSS/GEP & EQUAL Portugal, Lisbon.

But around the edges at CPsquare, the question of how we fit in as social artists is persistent, both existentially and economically. For example, CPsquare member Marc Coenders, whom we are shadowing this year is considering where it is that learning is happening (or could happen) around him in The Netherlands. He’s asking how to organize social learning strategies within organizational, competitive, and economic constraints? How bridge across organizations, projects, and cohorts so that the focus is not so much on individuals, but more on organizational learning cycles? In a way, “where is the learning” is exactly the question that Lave and Wenger were posing in 1991 except that now we know a lot more about the artistry of intervention and leadership than we did back then. (Among other places where you can explore these questions, you might consider one or more of the three BEtreats scheduled this summer.)

Mimi Ito, one of the anthropologists who was at the Institute for Research on Learning back in the 1990′s when Lave and Wenger was published, is still working on “before social artistry” questions: “Where is it that kids learn?” and “What is it that they are learning when using digital media?” She’s one of the leaders of the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, which puts on an interesting annual conference. She does some very nice social artistry when she reflects as a community leader on the conversations at the conference.
The hack v stack distinction that she uses to think about work in the educational research and innovation community (posed by Paul Edelman) gets at the question of where different kinds of learning happens or is needed in the “many fangled” world of education. (Ito’s reflections make me think that the DML Conference is a place where CPsquare members and friends could learn a lot.)

In a way, CPsquare member Sean Murphy is putting his social artistry to work developing a series of communities that hack the entrepreneurial culture in ten different locations in California, Illinois, and Minnesota. Specifically, he helps entrepreneurs learn their way to success in regular Bootstrapper’s Breakfasts. He’s purposely navigating around the venture capital ecosystem because of the way that it is focused on sorting people and firms, presuming that not everyone can win, necessarily creating losers. Among other things the venture capital system ends up rewarding people who learn to chase and spend other people’s money, sometimes at the expense of learning to grow more self-reliant firms. Sound familiar?

Despite our enthusiasm for and belief in social artistry, it’s important to remember that so much learning “just happens.” I just finished reading a wonderful book about a giant learning machine called Chungking Mansions. In Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong (Chicago, IL: Univ of Chicago Press, 2011) Gordon Mathews describes Chunking mansions, as: “the haunt of South Asian merchants, African entrepreneurs, Indian temporary workers, African and South Asian asylum seekers, and penurious travelers from across the globe. It is, as I discuss in the pages that follow, a ramshackle building in Hong Kong’s tourist district that is a hub of “low-end globalization;’ tightly linked to the markets of Kolkata (Calcutta), Lagos, and Dar es Salaam, among other cities across the globe.”

Mathews describes an impressive learning feat that goes on every day, sustained over many years: people learn to navigate the building, to do business with each other and get along remarkably well; to sort clothes and phones and a myriad of other goods manufactured in China and exported around the world; to navigate a very complex legal environment; and to evolve new trans-national and trans-cultural identities. And not many people in Chungking Mansions are likely to call themselves social artists, but as they work to survive and make money in Hong Kong (same old stacking), they are changing the world and themselves (hacking on a big scale). The book is highly recommended.

Ning, Ning, can you hear me now?

Meanwhile, back at home, in CPsquare we are fashioning a lens (a mirror?) to look at social artistry by comparing how different communities that rely on the Ning platform are configured and how they are faring in different circumstances. It’s clear that many of the questions we were raising in Digital Habitats are still worth working on. (We’re coming out with an e-book edition this month, by the way.) Drop us a line or leave a comment on the CPsquare website if you’re interested.

• It worked perfectly for some: I selected the video, started it for everyone and could pause it at any point. People watching it could enter comments in the chat or talk over the video.  But you can only watch videos that are on YouTube, so some of the videos from Pepperdine students that we would have considered for watching were excluded because of where they’d been published.
• Even with a uniformly experienced group with consistently high bandwidth and technology, there were some puzzling differences in experience.  When someone speaks, their image jumps to the center of the screen — but their own screen doesn’t show that!  Videos showed up on the main screen for some people but were in a completely other window for some.  If you have the “video” tab clicked on it shows a “related videos” message after a video has finished. But people who did not have the video tab clicked on saw the regular behavior: the face of the speaker (or recent speaker), jumps up to the center screen as the discussion proceeds.
• I take detailed notes in the chat (and encourage others to join me in that practice).  Since my keyboard is loud enough to be distracting during a conversation, I keep muting myself and have to un-mute to speak: it’s really clumsy to do that without a keyboard shortcut of some sort.

Bottom line: although there are clumsy things about it, having YouTube play a video for a small group opens up a lot of really cool possibilities.

Here is the agenda that Sylvia Currie and I had come up with:

In your check-in, give your name, location, and briefly describe any prior experiences attempting to get a group to “observe a CoP”?

After watching each video, we took the following questions one at a time:

• What did we see?
• Comment on the specific community that’s presented — What does it imply about “communities of practice”?
• What’s not shown?  What’s not visible?
• As a result of our watching together, what do we see about our own blind spots?

We watched two videos:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgzZQCZxh5w Ice Skating Sensations
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nfo42ci-Ko Joseph Sikeku talks about the technologies he uses at FADECO radio to reach Tanzanian farmers.

Our wrap-up question was: what are some useful and meaningful ways to look at CoPs together?

Here is my list of take-aways:

• Access matters a lot: we’re not allowed to observe some communities (others may need to observe them on our behalf) or their business is so foreign to us that we can’t even understand what they’re about.  The best we can do is get incrementally closer.
• Active and successful communities frequently have a support structure in the background that is invisible unless you look for it (which you might not do unless you understand something about the community itself).
• Individual interactions or specific roles are more easily observed than a community as a whole, but it’s that community context that gives meaning to the observable stuff.
• A community leader or convener or tech steward can see connections or relationships between people or tools that other community members may not be able to see (and that an outsider might not have access to).

• How to organize social learning strategies within organizational, competitive, and economic constraints? How bridge across organizations, projects, and cohorts so that the focus is not so much on individuals, but more on organizational learning cycles?
• How can social learning strategies focus on innovation and change rather than on established practice?  To extend the PhD research, what research methods are in accord with a social learning theory and complexity theory?

The series will run from November 2011 to October 2012.

The Shadow the Leader series has been going on for five years.

• We’ve explored questions of leadership, legitimacy, community launch, community tools and how they work together, the intersection of community peripheries and multi-membership, business models, and the interaction of community and organizations.
• The leaders we’ve shadowed have ranged from people who had never heard of CPsquare or communities of practice before to people who’ve been very involved in our community from the very beginning.
• The basic form has been quite simple.  Our monthly teleconferences always start with: “How is your community?” or “What’s happening in your practice?” and we take it from there.

We think this series is important because:

• It focuses on actual practice: examines what is working on the ground in a specific situation (asking why things work as they do) rather than on a theoretical “best practice” aimed at an imagined norm.
• It focuses on “the doing” over time: we discuss the goals, rewards, techniques, obstacles, confusions, and outcomes as they unfold in time.  Instead of the plan or selective the recollection long after the fact, we try to look at community leadership and development as it unfolds.
• It follows one person and the context in which they work over an entire year, with the inevitable ups and downs, moments of ambiguity and clarity, and sense of developmental trajectory.
• It is integrative: we ask how all the elements fit together: personal, political, technical, economic, conceptual, and organizational.
• It shadows a leader, but is unbiased about whether their practice is at the leading or the trailing edge at any given moment or in any given dimension.
• It is conducted so that CPsquare members can participate very casually (e.g., reading notes produced in the sessions) to more intensively (e.g., participating directly in the synchronous conversations).

Ground rules for our conversations are:

• Emphasize inquiry: we do not volunteer advice. Our goal is to understand the work through the eyes of a practitioner.  We seek an ethnographic stance rather than coaching the subject.
• Open participation: any member of CPsquare can jump into the conversation at any point.  Although the conversation evolves and a lot of context accumulates, the conversations are such that you can get a lot out of any one of the sessions without having participated in any of the previous ones.
• The series is designed so that multiple levels of participation are possible.  You can just scan the chat room notes, listen to an audio recording, “sit in” on the occasional call, or be one of the active participants in the whole series.

Our experience in the workshop confirms the notion that the technologies we use bring us together (somewhat more, often to great effect) and yet always exclude some people and always seem to require more planning.  If we want to meet during waking hours, some people are just left out of an international gathering like our workshop.  And if we meet at this time of the year, we have crazy daylight saving shifts to contend with.

Consider the fact that our workshop always has people from Australia, the US, and Europe and stretches across 6 weeks.  We use US time as the constant and our Monday get-togethers for the workshop that starts on October 24 bounce around as follows:

* Next day in Sydney

This particular miracle would simply would not happen reliably without the World Clock!

The Foundations Workshop

The Foundations of Communities of Practice Workshop  runs from Oct 24 to Dec 2.  We’re running late this fall due to a wedding.

First annual community development award to projects at Pepperdine University

With the support of Pepperdine University faculty members Margaret Riel and Paul Sparks, and the collaboration of Alice MacGillivray, Sue Wolff, and John David Smith, CPsquare is pleased to award Christian Borja and Noah Sparks, from Pepperdine’s MA in Learning Technology Program,  the

2011 CPsquare Award for Community Development through Action Research

This award is given to recognize skill and excellence in leveraging technology to support the formation, growth, and development of a community of practice through action research.  This award includes a membership in the CPsquare community and an invitation to present their work in the CPsquare Research and Dissertation series during the 2011-2012 year.

Accumulated (public) goodies on CPsquare’s Wiki

In the normal course of “business” at CPsquare, our Wiki grows and evolves.  Here are some pages in our public Wiki that have been updated because of conversations in CPsquare.

• http://cpsquare.org/wiki/Narrative_techniques now has another “how to” reference because Shawn Callahan was the “My Practice” person in September
• We have accumulated a remarkable collection of articles about communities of practice in the healthcare world and John Parboosingh and Jim Palmer added to the list in our most recent session of CPsquare’s R&D Series.
• (And the  resources related to Digital Habitats keeps growing, too.  For example, have you used Twitter to conduct a poll?

Of course all these pages are incomplete.  They need work.  Could you contribute?

Religions, communities and practice

During June, July and August, CPsquare capped off a conversation that has been brewing for 4 years, considering religious and spiritual communities from a community of practice perspective.

Once we started looking, what seems remarkable is that we conventionally think of religious and spiritual communities as completely different from the garden variety communities we observe or cultivate in corporations, schools and other institutions.  But come to find out, they’re not really so different.  Here are a few snippets from the conference.

• A traditional social form such as praying together is striking when we consider it as a learning activity.  May seem strange, but it’s not so far-fetched!  And prayer is a more malleable form than you might imagine.   One example we discussed was a prayer request meeting at Coco’s restaurant in Lake Forest that Saddleback Church sponsors.  It’s described on pp. 65-69 of Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010). It sure sounds like a community of practice meeting to me! (If you’re curious, the book has a website and a blog .)  Another example we looked at was how two Catholic nuns, Sisters Julie and Maxine, that have evolved a practice of regular prayer as a podcast on their website, http://anunslife.org.  Part of what makes it work as a podcast is that the sisters are exemplary community leaders: inviting, warm, authentic, and above all inquisitive.  Of course having the technology stewardshipchops never hurts. Question: what similar traditional community activities have you seen translate to the Internet? (Or fail to translate?)

• We also explored the relationship between formal organizations and communities in religious and spiritual the context.  From the organizational side, we heard about a very successful CoP on project management in the Mormon Church’s Office of Temporal Affairs that sounds remarkably similar to CoP projects in other corporate settings: dealing with organizational silos, the dance between formal and informal structures, gathering just enough resources for the community to grow, and keeping a focus on value-for-time.  From the opposite side, after the conference, Grady McGonagill shared a draft in CPsquare’s R&D Series of a study he is working on that looks at more than a dozen Buddhist meditation communities, considering how they depend on and develop formal organizational structures.  It seems that both “community inside!” and “organization inside!” are viable (and they all seem to have “Intel inside!”).  A third multivalent example comes from a session where Lisa Colton described independent minyanimwhich are self-organized Jewish worship and study communities.  They can either be an extension of or a (possibly threatening) alternative to traditional organized synagogues.
  Question: Does friendliness to communities have anything to do with whether an organization is “secular” or not?

• Joe Kutter, an American Baptist pastor and the director of that denomination’s Minister’s Council talked about pastors in protestant churches as a group who greatly benefits from participation in a community of practice because of how a leadership role can isolate people.  Among other things, he shared a big study that makes very interesting comparisons between pastors who participate in Pastoral Leader Peer Groups and those who don’t.   There are remarkable differences between the churches where those pastors serve, too.  (The study concluded that participation in peer learning had a very positive effect on factors such as church membership growth as well as leadership integrity and persistence.)
  Question: Is the presence or absence of community participation in a group of organizations a useful metric? Where have you seen it used?

So it turns out that the religious and spiritual side of society is an important laboratory for experimentation, conservation, and assessment of learning and communities of practice.  Maybe this summer’s conference is not “the end”, but rather an important new thread of our ongoing conversations about communities of practice.

2011 CPsquare Award for
Community Development through Action Research

This award is given to recognize skill and excellence in leveraging technology to support the formation, growth, and development of a community of practice through action research.  This award includes a membership in the CPsquare community and an invitation to present their work in the CPsquare Research and Dissertation series during the 2011-2012 year.

Welcome Christian and Noah!

Remarkable contrasts between the two sessions in terms of scale, although both instances were connected with Protestant communities in the US.  Snyder described a vision of renewal and innovation, where communities of practice could play a crucial role at different levels of scale in a large institution: both across multiple congregations and within a single church.  He brought out some of the organizational consequences and possibilities of such a strategy, speaking from the perspective of an organization that would cultivate many different communities and be transformed by their activity.  On one level it was an extension of ideas from Cultivating Communities of Practice, but the emphasis on the role and mission of the church and the satisfaction of participation in communities had a very different flavor from what has seemed typical in all the many communities that have been guided and inspired by that 2002 book.  In fact, Snyder pointed to the second and last footnotes in the book as reminders that part of the book’s vision was to ground the whole argument about communities in a civic and social purpose, rather than an intention that is primarily secular, commercial,  and corporate.  So this conference is in that sense reconnecting with a forgotten root.

The second “session” was at an entirely different scale.  Through Putnam’s eyes, we looked at one meeting on one morning of one of a Saddleback Church’s morning prayer breakfasts. Over oatmeal, omelets, and French toast 10 professionals enlist each other’s help in prayer and offer support and sympathy in dealing with everything from the challenge of a new client to grief over recent bereavement. Caren Levine sums it up:

I am particularly struck by the intimacy of the group, the lay facilitation and distributed leadership, and how they create sacred space together in a public venue which in itself seems to communicate that sacred community can be found anywhere.

1. Opening – Bill Snyder: Communities of Practice: Organizing for Renewal – June 27 (see more detail below)
2. Robert Putnam reading: Prayer request circles vignette from American Grace – June 29
3. Josh Plakoff and Estee Solomon Grey: Isomorphism between Judaism and Communities of Practice – July 5
4. Lisa Colton: the Jewish indie minyan “phenomenon” – July 7
5. Joe Kutter: Community of Practice initiatives in the American Baptist Church – July 20
6. Sr. Maxine and Julie – anunslife.org an online Catholic community – July 21

Not quite scheduled yet:

• Frank Daugherity, “A Christian community ministering to disaster victims in Japan.” Spiritual and religious communities are alive and well in Japan, despite the devastation from the 9.0 earthquake and Tsunami. Frank observes the interactions of several communities during a work mission with http://crashjapan.com/ during the first half of July. CRASH is a group of Japanese Christians that have been doing relief work all over Asia. Frank is an ordained minister and long-time member of CPsquare who lived in Japan for 20 years earlier in his life. How do the several communities show up and how might they evolve in their response to this crisis? Join us for an interview at (TBA).
• Dave Makokwski, “WebEx support for Tibetan New Year in an international Buddhist Sangha.” (TBA)
• A transcription and publication project as community of practice: http://www.unfetteredweb.org/pod/who-and-how

To give a flavor of our conversations, here are a few of the provocative propositions that William M. Snyder, co-author of Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge (Harvard Business School Press, 2002) with Etienne Wenger and Richard McDermott, has offered to kick off our conversations.

The learning church: initial propositions

William M. Snyder wsnyder@socialcapital.com

January 7, 2008

• The superordinate purpose of the church is the ongoing discovery and fulfillment of the Mission of God
  • This provides a context for setting expectations and priorities at global, diocese, and congregation levels
• As “the Body of Christ,” the church is built on human faith and relationships as well divine inspiration
  • Thus the church, like any community or organization, is affected by personal and social dynamics
  • This means attending to issues such as power, conflict, and personalities as well as scripture, sacraments, and spirit
• Many faith communities do not demonstrate capabilities required to engage and energize members to fulfill their mission
  • Key capabilities include leadership, community-building, and practice-innovation and -development
• We must dramatically increase our learning capacity to thrive: technical learning for improvement and transformational learning for sustained vitality and influence
  • Much to learn about learning from organization experience in other sectors
  • There is a growing repertoire of learning-related concepts, methods, and structures to draw on
• A key strategy for learning is cultivating generative relationships—across congregations as well as within them
  • Mutually supportive relationships among peer practitioners are key for generating ideas and getting them shared and applied
  • “Communities of practice” foster learning, innovation, and collaboration
• The church is a unique organization with distinctive capabilities—and barriers—for transformational learning
  • Large-scale, systematic change is not easy for established organizations, particularly ones (such as the Church) with a deeply embedded hierarchical structure and ideological buffers that obscure market forces
  • Yet the Church also has distinctive advantages: members’ faith and their communal commitment to embody the love of God provide an openness to the Spirit and a trustworthy foundation to build on
  • The Church’s “witness of hope” to the world also inspires internal renewal