My friend Peter Rawsthorne begins a series of blog posts today reflecting on what is required to keep a community of practice together online and across organizational boundaries.
What do you need to consider when building a Community of Practice CoP that spans organizational boundaries where client confidentiality needs to be honored. There are a plethora of things to be considered when building an online virtual community of practice, these include; the team and the contexts’ relationship with openness, the memberships ability to be self-determined, how online communication will be broadened and followed, and how the internet is the platform.
via Critical Technology: Virtual Community of Practice Conundrum.
Back in November Janaia Donaldson from Peak Moment TV interviewed Dave Pollard and I about the Art of Hosting, especially as it applies to transition towns, resilience and community leadership. That video was released today along with a lovely 10 minute edit in which Dave maps out some of the essential Art of Hosting elements using the GroupWorks Pattern Language card deck. Enjoy.
Tim Merry‘s work on collaborative advantage:
My friend and colleague Tim Merry is sharing some of his most recent thinking on project design and development here in Columbus at the Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics retreat we are doing. This is a really useful and interesting introduction to his approach:
Etienne Wenger provides a useful set of principles for cultivating communities of practice as living, breathing things:
- Design for evolution.
- Open a dialogue between inside and outside perspectives.
- Invite different levels of participation.
- Develop both public and private community spaces.
- Focus on value.
- Combine familiarity and excitement.
- Create a rhythm for the community.
Read more at the link below.
Amanda Fenton provides a very useful reference that helps underscore the reasons why core teams are important. It turns out that having 10%of a population deeply committed to an idea will significantly contribute to that idea being widely adopted by the other 90%.
I don’t know about the veracity of this claim in every context but it does point to the need to abandon the idea that everyone needs to be on board to make things happen. For steel real years I have been interested in helping groups create a topography of engagement whereby a core the holds a central circle of shared purpose and shared work and concentric circles are organized around this work. The team percent rule helps me to think about the mechanics if how invitation can spread and how container building scales.
Makes me think for example that if you engaged in transforming a large traditional conference to something radically participatory you need at least ten peer met of the participants to be committed to that new form. For a conference of 600 that means reaching 60 people. This means a core team of 10 needs to each find five other people to really commit to the idea. From there invitation can go broader and less deep. But without those 60 on the next ring out you run the risk of having 10 committed individuals trying to convince hundreds to take a leap.