Fantastic On-Line Workshop on Wikis at CPSquare in January 2009
I attended a workshop put on by CPSquare in 2003 on Communities of Practice that had a profound impact on my worldview. I met folks from around the US who helped to foster communities of practice in corporate, education, government, and non-profit settings and was surprised at how common the both the challenges and methodologies for overcoming them were.
I had a chance to spend a day with Doug Engelbart, we ended up sitting at the same table and did a number of small group activities together. His concept of bootstrapping as an improvement activity was an inspiration for our Bootstrapper Breakfasts, an effort to harness the collective IQ of a group of entrepreneurs who are each trying to get better to assist one another in getting better faster. Doug also demonstrated a version of his Open Hyperdocument System that has given me a model to aim for as we continue to improve the infrastructure for the delivery of our services: individual consulting, workshops, partner coordination, and collaboration as a part of the startup team to reach a working consensus on both strategy and the supporting materials to execute them.
I decided to take part in CPSquare workshop that just started yesterday, and I would encourage anyone who is interested in learning more about wikis and other modes of on-line and face to face collaboration to consider joining. It’s going to run for the next few weeks, blending conference calls with on-line forum interaction and a number of very interesting case studies. I have been asked to present some cases on how we leverage a number of on-line tools, wikis in particular, but I am only one of many folks detailing their practice.
We had a very good conference call to kick things off yesterday and I thought I would blog and encourage entrepreneurs who want to get better at combining a number of different modes of collaboration, both on-line and face to face, to sign up. It’s that good. The calls are taped and you will have access to the on-line examples so you haven’t missed very much at all if you sign up now. You can register here: http://cpsquare.org/conferences/ [Historical Link]
The benefits: if you don’t learn how to be more effective in on-line collaboration, including techniques for global teams, and how to blend on-line and face to face collaboration to improve the quality of team meetings and decisions, then you are not paying attention. Our clients, while they are still primarily Silicon Valley firms, now include teams in Denmark, China, Australia, Sweden, India, and England. And watching how this international group has coordinated on this workshop has given me a number of new tools and techniques to improve how we work at a distance.
It’s not my workshop, so I am not bragging about anything you will learn from me, but it’s a diverse and creative group of folks who are pushing the state of the art in collaboration. It includes Ward Cunningham who invented wikis and Etienne Wenger who helped to formalize the concept of a community of practice, a well as many other less famous but equally insightful folks.
SaaS, wikis, blogs are all more than a decade old: I think the next ten years may be as much about enhancing our understanding of how to leverage what’s already been invented as it is to invent new things. This will offer you an opportunity to start thinking hard about what that might entail in the way that you organize your work and your team.
Outline for Course
(from https://web.archive.org/web/20090107035127/http://cpsquare.org/conferences/edu/cp2tech/)
“Connected futures: New social strategies and tools for communities of practice” is a five week workshop for community managers, designers and conveners to explore social strategies and tools to support them (referred to by some as Web2.0). We anticipate offering it twice a year. This workshop is a hands-on, practice-shifting, dive into using new technologies to meet community needs. At the end of this workshop, participants can expect to:
- Become more confident in managing and combining tools to support a community’s orientation and ongoing activities
- Develop a deeper understanding of how new tools enable one another, are adopted and supported in communities
- Have productive and lasting social connections with other participants, leaders and community conveners.
New technology stewards are especially encouraged to join us. The workshop includes virtual field trips to successful communities and deep dives into the use of new tools. We will explore many freely available technologies, including web conferencing, teleconferences, blogging, RSS syndication, microblogging, social bookmarking and tagging, wikis, mashups, and social networking. Each aspect has the support of experts and leaders in areas such as organizational, educational, government and enterprise communities. Participants will work through a process of thinking through new social strategies and technologies to support the ongoing life of their respective communities of practice. Participants will also receive an advance electronic copy (PDF) of parts of the forthcoming book “Digital habitats: stewarding technology for Communities” (Wenger, White, and Smith 2008).
Requirements:
While this workshop is designed to be challenging (it is not for beginners) it is grounded in today’s reality for communities of practice, social strategies and new tools. Our aim is to support practitioners: participants should be in a leadership role or intending to take one on, or be convening an existing communities of practice.
- Participants are expected to be conversant with basic notions such as domain, community and practice and have had experience participating in or organizing online events and learning activities (like the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop).
- Participants should be willing to install, run and experiment with an array of tools (such as Skype) on their computers.
- Participants should be confident to converse in English.
- Participants commit to 20 to 40 hours of engagement over the 5 weeks. Since several phases and phase changes are designed into the workshop structure (we change technologies, modes of connecting, and frameworks), participants need to be attentive enough to make those changes with us when they are scheduled.
It includes a lot of modeling of learning interactions, stratagems, and tactics using a dozen different social technologies.
We’re designing the workshop to support:
- Getting to know each other and each other’s communities
- Creating “a workshop as laboratory”
- Exploring real communities, from an insider’s perspective to see community orientations & technology integration
- Considering the role and activity of the technology stewards in authentic situations
- Exploring the uses of social technologies to stay in touch as well as for sustained inquiry
- Experiencing the design of learning agendas and then configuring technology to pursue those agendas
- Articulate strategies to introduce new social technologies to a community
Readings from Wenger, White and Smith’s “Stewarding Technology for Communities” and several other sources on topics such as:
- Communities of practice theory glimpse
- Community technology stewardship
- Tools and their Integration
- Scanning the Technology Landscape
- Orientations: community experience and configuration of tools
- A More Distributed Future
- A Learning Agenda