Communities of practice: interview with John Smith

Netsquared had an interview with John Smith. That's the danger of delicious: I had tagged it because I didn't have time to listen to it when I saw it first, but fortunately I remembered to listen to it now.

The audio-interview has excerpts only. Unfortunately I couldn't trace the full interview- though I would have liked to listen to the full one- now it kind of jumps between hugely different subjects.

But John stresses the aspects of relationship building in communities of practice- as social contact is the primary vector for knowledge creation. Tacit knowledge is about sharing standards and perspectives whih needs people to spend time socializing. In the online workshop on cops this translates in the practice of letting outsiders interact with the participants and making use of mentors who have done the workshop before to help out and get people going with the technology.

Interesting is the part about online and face-to-face interaction: he is saying face-to-face is too important not to be preceded by online preparations. Technology should not be seen as a substitute for face-to-face but rather as a way of augmenting the value of face-to-face interactions. The other important remark I got was that most of the discussions about technology are vendor-centric discussions- and it's rather the other way around- ommunities jumping around using technology to communicate. Lastly: talking about practices in a very intimate kind of thing. (I think it would be hence be useful to distinguish levels of talking about practices- mm haven't really found any materials talking about that yet)