• 5,000 Watt FADECO radio station
• Small blue “sensor” or integrated circuit audio recorder
• Mobile phones

Of course the key to making all of this work is the network of people around his project in terms of friends and collaborators, farmers who participate via recorded interviews or mobile phones.  (A lot of stories about innovation in Africa were floating around my head from the special report on telecoms in emerging markets in the September 24th 2009  issue of The Economist: Mobile marvels).  One thing that was striking about Sikeku’s project is that it’s sustainable because it’s so local, so passion-driven, and has a long time horizon.  Not that external help wouldn’t make a difference, but it’s important that his project that’s not donor-controlled.  Its beginning and end is not timed by an external donor.  Here’s a 7 minute interview:

Sikeku’s story got me to thinking about the polarities that we discuss in Chapter 5 of Digital Habitats:

• Radio broadcasts are a remarkable technology for bringing people together across great distances.  It’s so prevalent as to be unremarkable.
• But radio is a very group-oriented tool, so tools like an audio recorder or a mobile phone pull the community’s configuration toward the individual end of the polarity.
• An audio recorder supports the asynchronous side and the mobile phones (either as audio devices or for text messages) support the synchronous.

It seemed to me that the technologies that Sikeku mentioned all balance each other nicely when you consider that we developed these polarities studying communities that are quite different from his. That’s one of the exciting things about this project: finding out whether the ideas we’ve developed apply (or can be extended to) very different settings.  And the final question: will these ideas be useful?

I captured the interview on a little Flip camera, since I’ve been exploring video and social reporting for the last several months.  I used the interview the very next day in a “huddle session” about technologies and local development, gathering a small group around my laptop to look at the video, without editing or uploading it anywhere (there wasn’t really enough reliable bandwidth to upload a video file at the conference).  The huddle conversation had been difficult because of all the different meanings and instances of “technology,” of “local,” and of “development.”  But having one instance to focus on helped the conversation get much more concrete and much more productive.  A conference on the role of media in the agricultural and rural development that’s running right now suggests just how much is going on out there in this area, so the benefits of being able to focus on Sikeku’s specific case make sense.

The next day we had an open space session on business models for learning communities.  Sikeku participated in the discussion, which tied some of the issues from his experience to other examples where donor funding for a community had turned out to be quite problematic.  At the end of that, Sikeku remarked to me, “As a result of these conversations, I don’t feel so isolated.”  That was very gratifying.

(Cross-posted to our Digital Habitats blog at http://technologyforcommunities.com.)

Marshall read (out loud, from the slide on the screen) that:

“Nothing is more commonplace than the experience of reading, and yet nothing is more unknown.   Reading is such a matter of course that at first glance, it seems there is nothing to say about it.”

She went on to argue that many of our commonplace assumptions about reading are wrong.  As an activity, we may think that reading is:

• stationary
• information-centric
• passive
• immersive
• individual

Instead, Marshall argued that and illustrated how reading is really:

• mobile – where we chose to read something matters hugely and we tend to take our reading with us from place to place.
• material – our physical circumstances contribute to the experience of pleasure or attention.
• interactive – we annotate pages and act upon them.
• interrupted & variable – we skip, skim, circle around, re-read and act upon reading material according to the circumstances.
• social – we share, forward, save, refer, discard and burn books and magazines in our invisible but very real social context.

There’s no problem having naïve assumptions about reading unless we’re intending to design an electronic replacement for the printed page, in which case we have to look a lot more carefully at what’s going.  That’s exactly what technology stewards need to do because, whether we’re configuring technology or planning to add a tool to a community’s overall configuration or even just supporting it on a day to day basis, we need to understand the experience of use, not just “how to use the tool.”

So we can learn a lot from the different ways that Marshall and other ethnographers have devised for getting at these commonplace experiences.  We take the ordinary as strange.  Nothing is more common than participating in a community, but a community’s configuration has a significant effect on the experience of community.

“It is also worth noting that solitary reading always was, and still is, inherently social: how we read is ultimately determined by social conventions and community membership”

You can learn a lot by observing. One piece of research that Marshall reported on examined just how complicated it is when someone reading an article in The New Yorker turns a page.  They peek forward, check an advertisement, read the cartoon, go back to verify what they last read, etc., and then continue.  There’s a lot happening that we may not bother noticing on a day-to-day level but which matters a lot when we’re thinking about designing a new electronic device.

Use a framework. One point we try to make in Digital Habitats is that it’s useful to have some framework to organize our observations. Marshall uses the CSCW matrix (that we call a polarity in the book) to look at some different instances of reading:

One interesting point she made was that people often feel like it’s creepy when they are observed doing something so simple (and personal) as reading.  As technology stewards we often have to enlist people’s cooperation, sometimes as fellow-researchers and observers of their own experience.

Compare (lots of) individual instances. In one of her studies Marshall bought multiple copies of a popular textbook and compared how students had annotated the text.  Turned out there was a lot of variation in what was important to different readers, but also convergence on the main point.  But the key idea is: how can we find ways of seeing how different people see?

This is similar to a tech steward’s practice of observing how different communities use the same software, or how they might configure it differently, or how they might even decide upon using it for quite different reasons.

One interesting thing about Cathy Marshall as she spoke to a group that’s mostly concerned with design was that she always spoke as a researcher — not venturing to speculate widely, but reporting on her own rigorous research.  Even though she committed apparent faux pas such as reading her slides aloud and there was very little (if any) “how to” in Marshall’s talk, the CHIFOO folks hung on her every word. It reminded me that professional, hands-on communities like CHIFOO are very sophisticated when it comes right down to it.

Tech stewards as ethnographers. Of course there are big differences between tech stewards and ethnographers.  Front loaded education is the norm for people who call themselves ethnographers, whereas most tech stewards come to their craft almost by accident – pressed into service and learning as they go.  Having Microsoft and other companies fund your observations like Marshall has enables a great deal of care and depth; most tech stewards are in a hurry and have to act on their hunches. And yet, the opportunity for observing change in human experience and contributing to its evolution (over shorter- or longer-terms) is common to both.  What tech stewards have lacked is a common literacy to talk with each other and the community context where their conversations can add up.

If you are really interested in communities of practice, you should join us as we 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?

The goal we set for ourselves in Shadow the Leader is to meet and reflect with a leader of a community of practice over a sustained period of time, getting to know a lot about one community.  It’s an opportunity to consider what we really know and really understand in terms of theory, of technology and of leadership.  From the very beginnings of this field, starting with Lave and Wenger’s Situated Learning, we have made progress due to scrupulous observation that took into consideration what we think we knew about learning but questioned our assumptions at the same time.  The “Shadow the Leader” series has operationalized that systematic scrutiny and reflection in the life of CPsquare.

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.

Nancy White and I go way back, since Margaret McIntyre said I should look her up and I volunteered to help at a conference in exchange for bunking on the White House floor almost 10 years ago. We’d worked on many projects together by the time the book project got going. Of course there’s nothing like working on a book for five and a half years together to really make friends…

Technology stewardship is something that people are doing whether it’s cool or not. Talking about the book in this way reminds me that it’s very important that our thinking came from actual practice. We were practitioners first, authors and “students of technology stewardship” later. So talking about the book like this tends to naturally look back at the past and look forward toward the future. As a result there are many things we want to know about the future of our practice and the future of yours. Where does the book lead you?

Yesterday I noticed an interesting webinar format that solves one of the persistent boundary and participation problems that I see with this kind of software. Intronetworks held a webinar on “community management as a job.” I was late to the presentation, so when the GoToMeeting screen first came up, the first thing that caught my eye was that Twitter IDs were used to identify the speakers:

Like many such webinars, the audio channel was the main thing.  But I realized that a twitter stream with the hashtag “introchat” was the main visual. There were some slides, but visually the audience was asking questions, making comments, inviting others into the session. In the course of an hour there were almost 500 tweets. Huge audience participation relative to what the sages on the stage were offering.

It felt like the beginning of a community of practice of community managers. At least a drop-in jam session of one.

Two years ago I wrote about the Intronetworks software and was kind of critical about the hard boundaries between “inside” and “outside” their application here and here. (That may be because people want those boundaries, however.)  Interesting to see them innovate by using webinar software in such an open way.

After more than 5 years working on it, Digital Habitats (the book I wrote with Etienne Wenger and Nancy White) is here.  (At least a couple proof copies have arrived in the mail.  Copies for sale are on their way.)

It has been really fun.  What’s next?

Stay tuned.

Could you please share with me what the practices (and or policies) regarding the “housing” of CoPs in your organizations are?  Do you house them outside the firewall of your organization?  Does your organization endorse officially this external sites when they are open to clients and other stakeholders?

For those of you who are so kind to reply to me, I will share more of the organizational context that is driving us learn about other organizations practices -the bottom line is we are trying to determine the risks of endorsing these external sites which, in principle, would be open for staff, clients and other strategic stakeholders or our organization.

I thought I should share my response here.

Yesterday morning I happened to be hosting a SCOPE session that seemed relevant to this.  The 3-week SCOPE seminar was about issues that come up when an organization (such as the Ministry of Education in Colombia) supports many communities that may or may not communicate with each other.

Yesterday’s session turned the question on its head and addressed this question: what happens when one community spreads out beyond the organization’s own platforms?  Specifically, how Staffordshire University hosted a community on best e-learning practices whose membership was largely outside the University.  It’s interesting to me that to accomplish the learning objectives for the University’s own staff, they needed to bring along so many “outsiders” on the original Moodle platform.

Anyway, at one point they added a Ning site and a Facebook group to their original Moodle space.  All three platforms seem to coexist well and they each plays a role in the community’s technology configuration.  (We talk about this example in the Digital Habitats book, which is almost ready to go to the printers.)  So if you count “by platform” the community lives 2/3rds of the way outside the University’s “grounds”.  And if you count “by member” it might be 5/6th outside.  (Those numbers are from memory, by the way.) I asked Helen Walmsley, the presenter and the community leader who supported the community, whether her administration had any difficulty with this odd logic (that to accomplish “internal” organizational goals they were subsidizing and leveraging “the external” so much).  She said not.

By the way, there’s a session tomorrow (IN SPANISH) where Alvaro Galvis is going to talk about a network for faculty in Colombia.

There’s a practice. This book is more than just a manual on how to use Twitter. (There are certainly enough of them out there by now.) What struck a chord with me was the feeling that it gave me a window into some of what being a pastor in a church is about. Pastors are pivotal leaders who play a very complex role in their communities. Sometimes they are domain spokespersons, sometimes team leaders (of volunteer or paid teams), and sometimes learners trudging along the path. Most interesting, you get the sense from reading this book that there is a widely distributed community of practice of church pastors who have a lot to learn from each other. (It’s a professionalized occupation, or calling, where seminaries have had a gate-keeping role, so learning from each other may need more support than it did a generation or two ago.) But the book suggests that pastors need to learn from each other about handling issues of connecting with church members selectively and impactfully, with personal privacy, and with marginality (e.g., not just being ‘relevant on Sundays only’). All these issues come up in the context of using Twitter for a church. So, bottom line, the practice of being a pastor is similar to that of leading many other communities of practice. There could be a lot of learning on both sides.

There’s a community. I love the way Coppedge suggests that there’s a real social network out there that can provide examples and support. (And he just names names like spiritual entrepreneur Dave Ferguson or digerati pastor Terry Storch). Following them or Anthony Coppedge himself obviously gives you access to that community. But I found it surprising that his book didn’t mention hashtags. Beyond increasing traffic with such things as #followfriday, hash tags are an obvious way for conversations within a church or among a community of pastors to take place. Why not advocate hashtags like these?

• #pdx1stbaptist
• #t4pastors
• #t4church

There’s a learning agenda. Finally, the book is filled with nice quotes that suggest an authentic learning agenda. For example:

“The Church cannot be content to live in its stained-glass house and throw stones through the picture window of modern culture.” — Robert MacAfee Brown

Although the worry may not be stated in terms of stained glass, I’ve heard Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Buddhists voice very similar concerns. Relevance and connection are very important.  Addressing the issue will take more than Twitter.

In the end we hired Michael Valentine to do the diagrams and book design, Peter + Trudy Johnson-Lenz to help with the editing, and Sunday Oliver to produce the index.  Even with complete professionals on board with the project, we still maintained a do-it-yourself  style.  But I’m not sure about “fast” or “easy.”

An example of how doing it ourselves makes things not so fast was when we were looking at the “completed” index recently.  We found that we had an entry for “folksonomy” in the glossary but it had disappeared from the book itself.  Should we remove the entry from the glossary even after it was type-set?  We decided that the index entry should point to the glossary and also say “See tagging,” index an entry that still had several mentions in the text.  All well and good except for the fact that Etienne took it as a challenge to improve on the index.  And he did find an instance where we had misspelled Marc Coenders’ name along the way and he will undoubtedly improve the index.  But, working on the index do-it-yourself style has to get squeezed between hosting visitors from Hong Kong and Sydney, flying across the Atlantic Ocean at least once, and finishing overdue reports for less forgiving entities than you, the potential reader of the book.

So if not “so fast” or “so easy,” does self-publishing still seem like such a good idea?  I think so.  We’re still going to use a print on demand service and sell the book through Amazon and other channels.  But we’ve decided to have CPsquare be the publisher of record in order to segregate the work from other projects and streamline it.  Who knows what surprises lurk in the segregation and streamlining?  As Jean Lave said, “That learning occurs is not problematic. What is learned is always complexly problematic.”

Jean Lave, “The Practice of Learning”, p 3-32 in Seth Chaiklin and Jean Lave (eds) Understanding Practice; perspectives on activity and context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).