Phronesis

Different languages of communities of practice

On the train on my way into Lisbon this morning I was reading "Beyond Communities of Practice: Language, Power and Social Context" (Eds. David Barton and Darin Tusting).

I felt relieved and excited to see the discourse of new literacies, discourse theory and and language-in-use being used in the same breath as communities of practice. I have been using it myself and have been wondering why no-one else could see it!

Then I got off the train at Entrecampos and went to "negotiate a tender" for building a community of practice on social innovation. During this negotiation I realised, once again, how people tend to see a community of practice as a platform. Or, rather, they think that building a platform, with lots of functionalities, plus some "animation" will create a community of practice.

In other words there is this gap in people's thinking between the lived in experience of human beings - with all their strengths, frailities and social lives - and the tools and technology they use. One person builds (animates) the community while someone else builds the platform.

This view is a contrasting one to the Communities of Practice notion of "Technology stewardship". Nancy White blogs the definition that she and Etienne Wenger and John Smith came up with for a technology steward:

“Technology stewards are people with enough experience of the workings of a community to understand its technology needs, and enough experience with technology to take leadership in addressing those needs. Stewardship typically includes selecting and configuring technology, as well as supporting its use in the practice of the community .”

And in a private email with John Smith he mentions the difference between "implementing technology requirements" and "steward technology needs in practice". His comment came up in the context of a conversation about the difference between translating and negotiating meaning, where I observed that the differences between translating and negotiating meaning include:

• negotiating meaning is more time-consuming than translation.
• negotiating meaning is a messy, bits and pieces process, not a linear one, whereas translation can be linear.
• translation might be instrumental, but negotiating meaning is more like an act of love
• negotiating meaning can't be separated from your status/authority 
  
• in the discourse communities/languages you are bridging, whereas translation can.
• negotiating meaning is a more social process than translation
• spending time negotiating meaning means that you don't do other things which are important to you.
• the more you negotiate the meaning, the more you feel like you and the words belong to each other.

So where am I getting to with all this? I guess I'm feeling the frustration that I always do of speaking different languages. There are people researching and writing about communities of practice, there are people with lots of experience of communities of practice, and there are others who have the funding for communities of practice. There are some overlaps between the languages that they all speak, but there are also LOTS of false friends.

technorati tags:technologystewardship, communitiesofpractice

Are you a Yes2.0 or a No2.0?

A not uncommon scenario for me is to be asked to roll out the recipe for building an online community of practice. What software/platform should we use? What are the steps? There is usually funding for a platform, and, increasingly, some funding for training and facilitation as an add on to the platform.

Dave Snowden talks of something similar in Natural numbers, networks and communities. "...in the early days" a portal was installed, a taxonomy created and you sat back and wondered how you could get people to codify their knowledge. Another rule was you rolled out the plans, templates and processes to build a community of practice and wondered how to motivate people to engage.

Snowden advises not to spend money on roll out programmes, but to use it on training super-users among the opinion leaders. In my own proposals I have called these people "champions" and budgeted for involving them in the choice of selecting tools and helping them to use them. In other words, look at what is already there and, as Wenger, White and Smith say in the Communities of Practice Tech report (soon to come out) - see how you can support and extend what they are already doing.

The problem with this process is that it can look messy, unstructured and not controlled. And it doesn't forefront a glitzy super site that will impress the funders. On the contrary this approach even suggests that simple tools could do the job.

Beth Kanter has a great PowerPoint presentation on "Demystifying Web2.0 tools" that she and David Wilcox did in London on Monday. In it she suggests how you can tell if an organisation is ready for Web2.0:

YES 2.0

• you want to express the human voice of your organisation
• you want to enable easy ways for people to share knowledge and information
• open source thinking - willing to share ideas in progress and let others join in and help it
• can deal with the messiness
• you already have the basics covered.

NO 2.0

• you are obsessively controlling
• if your organization is not ready for some changes in how you work
• your audience is not online
• everything must be vetted by central authority
• your copy or campaign messaging is written in stone, not electricity
• you aren't prepared to assist people in learning a new skill and the time to make it an organizational habit.

I can think of two more things I would add to No2.0: 1) you are expecting to spend most of your budget on tools and technology; 2) you haven't thought of a budget that takes you to events and processes beyond the launch of a platform.

Communities of practice - lessons from the World Bank

Thanks Joitske for pointing to this video about client based communities of practice in the World Bank.

First it was interesting to hear Monica Amorim describe the Rede Nos project in Brazil where they are using communities of practice to combat exclusion in the north and north-east of Brazil. She raises an issue I share which is the lack of non-English resources in development materials (and very very little in Portuguese).

I took notes on Erik Johnson's comments about one of their programmes of communities of practice for public expenditure management. His lessons are some of the same ones I've learned in other contexts. Here's a summary of what he said:

Challenges

1. Constellations of communities of practice. Whereas people begin by saying "we have six communities", there are really sub-sets and higher levels of communities. It is an organic process, not a fixed one.

2. The language issue. In videoconferences you can have simultaneous translation but in electronic communication it's unwieldy and expensive to think of translating everything.

3. Different paces of reforms in different countries.  People are sharing lessons at different stages. How do you create learning without some people feeling that they are less evolved or less important than the other?

4. Communication on an ongoing basis. How do you support that?

Criteria

1. WIFM. Whenever a community is identified you need to be clear that people's desire to learn  from each other that will enhance their work. The learning has to be something that will benefit what they are doing.

2. Ongoing communication. Support staff for the community of practice need to be already engaged with country teams and know the people involved in the projects. The "business" of community of practice should be one more thing to say in an ongoing conversation and not one extra task to do.

3. Preparation for the launch of the community or practice.  Preparation is key especially for people who haven't met before. Whoever is facilitating needs to be able to communicate with participants in advance and get a sense of their common interests so that the launch reflects those. Benchmarking can be used for that. What needs to come out of a launch is a learning agenda i.e. the key issues the community want to learn together.

(Bev asks: Why do people think that the launch starts at a face-to-face event? Why not have an online ramp-up where people start getting to know each other talking about their expectations?)

4. Sustainability. Even though it's a moving target, you have to think of how it's going to happen. You have the launch and then people are waiting to see what's going to happen. You need to keep things moving and not treat it as a one-off event.

(Bev says to John: We've never described our work on weaving online and face-to-face in relation to sustainability, but I think we should).

You have to have ways of engaging everyone who participated in the launch whether they attended or not - and at least one person from each country.

Importance of empowering the champions - work with them in defining the agenda and getting them to shape the issues.

5. Evaluation. It's difficult to evaluate because a community of practice is not a one-off event but an ongoing one. Neither is it a big loan or grant, so it's harder to define what the outcomes are. You need to think creatively about it. You can evaluate stories to understand the impact. And you can follow the impact of one member on another - you can track that causality through the community of practice and evaluate if the community of practice has helped that take place or not. There are no tools for that.

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