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SearchCoP: a Yahoo group October 7, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : COP , 2comments

This may be of interest to at least two different sections of my readership. Those interested in search engines, intranets, and those who care about communities of practice.

I wonder how many practice communities would include the acronym “CoP” in the group name though, apart from the meta ones. But why not.

SearchCoP: a Yahoo group about intranet search « interviews with content managers and other IT professionals
SearchCoP: a Yahoo group about intranet search
October 6th, 2007

In June 2007, Seth Earley and Avi Rappaport founded the Search Community of Pracitice (SearchCoP) Yahoo Group

Community launch from an event September 3, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : distributed research, theory, Community, online facilitation, COP, edublog, web2.0 , 5comments

Thinking about a community birth process which I’ve just witnessed during August, it seems appropriate to try and generalise  and  seek further applications.  A month long training course, open and free to attend, generates a momentum of interest, good will, and community indicators.

“what are we going to do when it’s all over?”
“I’m really going to miss the daily podcasts”
“I’m a few days behind, will the content still be available?”
“this forum is the best I’ve ever been in”

So then one of the convenors makes the announcement that the thirty day challenge goes on forever, and an ongoing community of practice is born. Of course the momentum built up during an occasional time-delimited event cannot be sustained at the same level, which is just as well, but the chances of enough residual activity continuing to get a self-sustaining community off the ground are probably a lot greater through this method, whether pre-planned or not, compared with the precarious method of trying to build up a critical mass through recruiting ones and twos, adding member by member, month after lonely month.

And yet, often the last days of a temporary online gathering are used to acheive closure, to sum up, and say ‘thanks a lot, and goodbye’.  I began to  wonder what would happen if…..

What if the conference on Web2.0 in January 2006 had been encouraged to continue onwards in situ?

What if a hotseat event, where people gather to ask questions to an invited guest, were to be left open and made public to generate further discussion amongst the participants and others. Maybe each and every hotseat or conference has a potential to spawn a practice community, to provide a growing public space. Many will dwindle and peter out after a while but maybe some will flourish instead of being shut down and put away.

I’m sure there are a few other examples where an online learning event has spawned a persisitent community, but nowhere near as many as have been  conveniently wrapped up and dispersed. It’s not as if anybody would be forced to hang around against their will, or that any measurable resources would be consumed to allow event based learning communities to live on.

Or to put it the other way around, if you are hoping to launch a distributed  community of practice then consider starting off by organising a month long conference at a specific time and space, build up a sense of occasion and then take it from there.

July 4th Wiki Wednesday July 5, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : social objects, wikiwed, London, COP , add a comment

Another London Wiki Wednesday last night, and a good one too. This time hosted by Bearing Point in Paternoster Square.
St Paul's cathedral with a sheep's head in front of it
Tiddlywiki was on show again, this time with a quick prototype of an app for setting up VOIP connections in the form of “speedgeeking” which was chaotic as intended.

I spoke on ‘the importance of theory’ briefly relating Communities of Practice and Social Objects theories to the online landscape and wikis. No slides or pitches, just conversation really.

Steve Coast put on a great presentation explaining the rationale behind wiki.openstreetmap.org

“OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the whole world. It is made by people like you.”

PS regarding the date, I was amazed to see that a group on Facebook called

“Petition to revoke the independence of the United States of America”

has 88,057 members!

Collecting tips for online facilitators and moderators July 2, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : Community, distributed research, online facilitation, COP, listservs, Wiki , add a comment

Like a previous post, ( and this one and this one ), this is another blog post inspired by conversation on a listserv (email discussion group).

The discussion was sparked off originally by a request for advice on dealing with repeated disruption in an online community. The e-Mint community responded with some suggestions, including technological measures. Then I invoked an ethical dimension to the topic and the scope continued to broaden. Participants started to append little notes of congratulation to their contributions, in appreciation of the discussion and then we agreed to capture the main points onto a wiki page which is currently hosted on DARnet, here.

wiki

I was going to reproduce my own point of view in this post, since I have some quite clearly differentiated attitudes in comparison with other practitioners, but I think I’ll just post a link to the wiki page which is a collaborative effort and contains a pluralistic approach to the collection of tips and the art of summary.

Tips_on_community_behaviour_issues_for_moderators

If you are a facilitator or moderator then I’d appreciate it if you’d have a look and let us know if this kind of thing is of any use beyond the context within which it arose or not. If it seems worthwhile, then do please bookmark the page, share it, edit it and add in your tuppence worth wherever you like.

Talking about wages is not the same as price fixing June 26, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : politics, COP, listservs , add a comment

My friend Miguel read the discussion in the online facilitation listserv and decided to note it on his blog rather than reply there, which is fair enough. I do that sometimes.

eme ká eme
Price-fixing and communities of practice.

This week there was an exchange that ended thus:

On 21/06/07, Elissa Perry wrote:

I belong to two other “professional” lists and both have stated in their rules and enforce a no pricing discussion clause as this can be construed as illegal price-fixing.

One group¹s rules state “Rule: 1.5 Please don’t discuss freelance rates on this list, as it potentially violates antitrust/price-fixing laws. This is non-negotiable.”

Another group has a rule which states

“Rule 72b: Anybody who interferes with a free flowing discussion by introducing unnecessary words of caution, calling upon laws of foreign lands and quoting rules from unspecified other groups shall be 1) cautioned 2) banished 3) deported to Australia.”
–
Andy Roberts

Andy’s quip is worth reading :-). But Elissa had raised an interesting point. Indeed that was not the first time that I have seen debate about freelance prices quashed in a community resource. A printing and pre-press forum is notorious for the squabbles whenever labour issues are raised.

Communities of practice are a queer beast in this sense. They are somewhat of a “vertical labour union” gathering different levels of professionals, often bosses and workers side by side, so they are awkward places to debate the sharing of the spoils.

And, when the members are indeed all independent service providers… they become a prime coordination environment. In the unlikely event of a profession-wide membership (or a membership wide enough to determine prices) it can indeed be perceived as a cartel. Which can be illegal, or not, depending on the country.

I’m glad you liked the quip. I’ll probably blog a reply myself but meanwhile I’d like to say that I view communities of practice as essentially horizontal, not vertical. What practices do managers have in common with workers? Employers have more to discuss with each other, even in competitive corporations, as do workers of the same trade regardless of who they work for. So I would think it perfectly reasonable for practitioners who organise together in communities to discuss pay and conditions.
The confusion with price fixing cartels of the rich and powerful is not helpful, nor ever likely to be applicable.

( Read Miguel’s further comment on his site )

The mention of deportation to Australia, by the way, for readers unaquainted with UK history is a reference to the Tolpuddle Matryrs, who were dealt with such in the 1830s precisely for organising a combination of agricultural workers against poverty wages in the rural economy.

In response to another post, I wrote:

I would reject the idea that a group of people disclosing
their individual pay rates could constitute a cartel. Monopolies which
seek to inflate profits through artificial price fixing of commodities
and workers seeking to ascertain a going rate let alone a decent
living wage, are two very different scenarios.
The issuing of warnings about implausible legal ramifications is not a
neutral action, however well meant. For a start, there is the
question of which counry’s legal system, if any, holds sway over
different individuals. Presumably the people who would urge caution
would logically need to take the laws of the most repressive state
represented in this international group, and quel the discussion down
to a level which complies with the most draconion of legal systems.

It can’t be illegal in many places in the world simply for folks to
talk to each other, and if that were to be the case then the best
attitude to take is not to voluntarily export such repression onto the
internet, but to secure new freedoms there.

Cognitive Edge: Hubert’s error February 10, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : Community, blogs and community, COP, tools, Wiki , 3comments

Dave Snowden provides a strong response to two comments made by Hubert St Onge ( one of the authors of an important modern book about communities of practice Cognitive Edge: Hubert’s error )

1. That Blogs and Wikis are publishing tools not collaboration tools, and in the case of blogs the publishing is individualistic/egotistical.
2. That an organisation should mandate one tool for collaboration, rather than allowing diversity; but that participation in the use of those tools should be voluntary.

I can see exactly why Dave would need to take to his blog and strongly oppose these ideas, but on the other hand I can also imagine possible contexts in which the comments can be valid.

Certainly blogs tend to be individualistic, and the much vaunted “conversations” which they may faciliate can tend towards the networking type of interaction rather than the many-2-many model which I believe to be more powerful in some ways.

Whilst Dave’s experience of blogging has been something to enthuse about:

Cognitive Edge: Hubert’s error
In over 15 years of taking part in collaborative spaces I have seen less intimacy, less exchange and less learning than in the six months that I have been writing this blog.

he still likes to invest a fair amount of thought and time into taking people to task in the various “listserves” (email groups), and develops the practice which I do a bit of myself, namely finding inspiration through conversation in groups, and then working the content up into a blog post, or sometimes the other way around.

The second point, about standardising on one tool, could also make some sense in terms of avoiding the draining effect of dissipation of conversation through the proliferation of channels, but it really depends again on the context or organisation concerned.

I think my own views about this have been evolving and I no longer see the opportunity presented by blogs for anybody to self publish as being something which may threaten to supersede or diminish the established format of online communities, in fact the boundary crossing nature of the tools is just as likely to pull new people in to them.

On Barn Raising again November 22, 2006

Posted by Andy Roberts in : distributed research, Community, COP, Wiki , add a comment

Earlier barn raising

Back in March this year, I was frantically running various exhibitions, gathering data and writing up reports for the degree course from which I graduate this week. Part of that was a Barn Raising event, which is explained here and here and here or view search results here . We didn’t exactly build a barn in the end, but there was a coffee shop for a while, and some useful development of the 4 dichotomies. My thoughts about that at the time were documented in an exhibition write up module.

With more passing of time and with further developments in the wikisphere such as the proliferation of wikispaces and now jotspot etc I would be less inclined to attempt an inter-community barn raising as envisaged back then. Wiki takeup has grown way beyond the boundaries of any single thing with a common purpose which could be described as THE wiki community. There are now legion.

FAQ building

But the metaphor of barn raising, of gathering people together to pool efforts for a limited period with a specific focus is still a useful one.

I’ve used it recently within some communities in order to get a FAQ document off the ground. In the first case, there wasn’t a wiki at all beforehand, but there was a strongly held belief that an old FAQ document existed somewhere, in people’s inboxes, waiting for time to update it. This had been the situation for at least three years such is the slow pace at which things actually get done in that place! It only took a suggestion from myself made twice, and then someone else to actually create the wikispace, then a tiny bit of adjustment and encouragment and all of a sudden the whole thing fell into place. A smallish group worked together to get the FAQ and the Wiki all sorted out within less than a week or so. Something had definitely been built which beforehand hadn’t existed. I got a nice acknowlegement, just for triggering the process really. (Don’t blame me if you go and read the FAQ and try to make sense of it)

Page of the week

Another practice which I’ve adopted is that of designating a “page of the week” on the DAR wiki. This is mainly a means of focussing my own attention on a page, usually in alignment with something that is going on in one of the communities I belong to. A week can be much longer than seven days, by the way.

ukcider wiki

Closer to the original concept, is the current push on the ukcider wiki to build up the cider makers FAQ. I initialised this originally by suggesting that sometime in November we should designate one week as “FAQ week” in which efforts are channeled together. This turned into a less specific FAQ month and has had considerable sucess, with a handful of people helping to develop the FAQ from a skeleton into a sizeable resource, at the same time encouraging wider and deeper discussion of the core practices on the mailing list. Should I perhaps write a separate entry entitled How to organise a FAQ month?

Wikipedia raids

Finally, I wanted to point to a related practice realated by Shawn Callahan at Anecdote, called “Wikipedia raids“, which is not so alarmingly Viking as it may sound. I can see a lot of value in using collaboration on a domain-related wikipedia page as a community building excercise, and I’m eager to try that out soon, taking care not to set up an instant all out conflict between the raiders and resident wikipedians!

Two interesting studies in progress November 11, 2006

Posted by Andy Roberts in : edublog, COP, Wiki , 2comments

I was asked by Warren Crosbie if I know of any papers which refer to any relation between Communities of Practice and Folksonomy. Warren himself, has an advanced wikispace called Tagunity.

I knew that Linda Hartley had researched folksonomy more than me, and she came up with a link to “The Medium is the Message” as a pdf file of a Thesis Proposal by Martin Kloos, I don’t know if that helps, but through truncation I’ve had a look at Martin’s Blog, “About my masters thesis, ‘Web 2.0′ and Communities of Practice…”

That looks like a valuable blog, it’s a shame I can’t read Dutch more than about 17.5%. The thesis proposal however is in English. I wonder why that is ?

Prato Dialogue October 7, 2006

Posted by Andy Roberts in : Community, blogs and community, COP , add a comment

This Prato dialogue is taking place here in Florence, now. Photos etc to follow, meanwhile here’s the link to the Blog http://pratodialogue.wordpress.com/

When moderation goes wrong August 30, 2006

Posted by Andy Roberts in : blogs and community, COP , 2comments

Another insightful discussion has broken out in the onlinefacilitation yahoogroup, and it’s great that the messages there are public facing, so that I can provide direct hyperlinks into individual messages which blog readers can visit without having to register or anything.

Beverley Trayner initiated the thread with a question about who owns posts.

Bev later elaborates on the story, which gave cause for concern, and sums up some of the replies received.

Rosanna rewrote one of her responses on her blog , (permalink not working atm) and I’m doing the same with mine below:

Beverley’s story is a true gift for us here, because of the way it
portrays real events in an online community rather than hypothetical
or hoped-for ones. I find the unravelling of disputes fascinating as
much as sad, beause they go so much further in revealing the true
underlying power relationships which are sometimes inherent in the
nature of the particular technology itself, or it’s implementation.

It’s very interesting that the dispute appears to have precipitated as
a result of one group continuing a dialogue referring to f2f meetings
in the online forum. That’s pretty much what I would expect to happen,
but another group, the moderators, which may or may not have an
overlap with the activists, acted to squash discussion, presumably
acting in an overprotecting manner thinking they were helping to avoid
a potential problem with the the non f2f people feeling left out by
these particular conversations.

OK, so the moderators are inexperienced, they don’t have the
confidence to just let things flow. Perhaps they were also guilty of
trying to set up an ‘artificial’ discussion space, with preconceived
ideas about exactly what the potential membership would be expected to
talk about and how they would be expected to behave, even if they
would surely fall short of that themselves.

The question which occupies my mind, is what are the contributory
factors which guided the the moderators to start acting in a way that
broke the community?

I suggest some possibilities:

*Pattern of thought and behaviour brought over from our current
society which encourage a top-down controlling structure as the only
workable possibility.

*The bulletinboard software, like so much social software these days,
comes preconfigured for a hierarchical group of all powerful
moderators. The role of the administrator as appointer of moderators
with the power to censor comes built in, and is therefore often taken
to be the normal way to behave. When under stress, the temptation to
actually use these powerful tools which are positioned right under the
nose, may be difficult to resist.

*Fashionable consensus and nearly all of the written advice and
conclusions from research all tell people that the key to successful
online community lies in facilitation, where the term facilitation has
passed into wider coinage as a euphamism for moderation, which in turn
is a euphamism for one person holding the unnegotiable power over
another to tell them what they can or can’t say and where they can or
cannot say it.

I think that in practice these days, given the difficulty for any
group of people who want to hold discussions in setting up something
that doesn’t involve appointing at least one all powerful moderator,
the best policy is probably to appoint only one, and for that person
to do as little as possible. This is the benevolent dictator model,
or absent dictator model. Technology for the truly unmoderated group
does still exist on the internet, and a few tens of thousands of
unmoderated groups persist quite happily, but not on the
world-wide-web where every space has to be owned by somebody.
Experiments with the “everyone is a moderator” model have not been too
sucessful in the longer run. A simple fact is that the more moderators
a community has, the greater the opportunity for one of them to turn
rogue, go insane , or make a mistake with seriously damaging
consequences.

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