Finding the 'elephant paths' of a community of practice

I've been facilitating a community of practice about sustainable energy in the Netherlands over the past 3 months. I had a meeting with the convener of the community before we started. When we tried to 'design' for a community we stumbled upon a lot of questions like: who are we going to invite, what roles can we distinguish, should we use online media or not? It is not easy to make all these decisions upfront. We differed on who to invite: I wanted to invite a wider group of professionals and the convener wanted to start with an old working group. The convener wanted an advice from the group in 3 months and my worry was that it would not leave enough room to discuss their own practice questions. I worried a lot when we started and finally decided to give this a try and use the 3 months to see and observe the dynamics and what emerges.

The community dynamics
What happened during the 3 months was this:

• A few people never showed up.
• The convener got ill and hence could not participate in the meetings. Two other persons with a high stake in the topic took over.
• A tied group formed of professionals who really connected based upon similar practice questions
• One person realized after the second meeting that his work practice didn't fit it with the group and sent his colleague. 
• The group was divided about the usefulness of exchanging online, so online was limited to email, but at some point one member took the initiative to create a LinkedIn group.
• It was possible to balance individual interest with the request for advice. We made an inventory during the first meeting of practice issues and used online voting to set priorities. Hence we formed 3 groups based upon their major interest in a topic. I think it was actually appreciated that there was a question from a higher level for advice. This made it possible to merge individual learning with collective learning. 
• 3 months was very short to come up with the advice but we were given the flexibility to take a little longer. 

The elephant paths

I already blogged before about the balance between design and emergence in communities. I didn't know the term elephant paths then, but I learned this term during a MOOC on change management organised by SIOO. Elephant paths are the shortcuts people take to safe time walking or cycling from A to B. Here's an interesting 14 minutes video in Dutch, showing that people are very persistent in following their own route. The 3 months has permitted me to see what the elephant paths are for the people in this community: for instance the key persons and core issues but also preferential ways to learn. 

Design upfront versus self-organization

I shifted a bit in my thinking about design of communities - I was always convinced that you should over-facilitate and allow for sufficient space for self organization. Now I believe that you can start with a clear design as long as you have eye for the 'elephant paths'.

PS: just realized this is my 600th blogpost!

The shoemaker and his (own) mould

For years I have been wearing orthopedic shoes. The fun thing is that you may design your own shoes. The first pairs of shoe pairs it was quite frustrating that they do not look out exactly as you designed them... Since years I know that the final shoe will not look exactly like my design and I think it's fine. I'm going to switch from one shoemaker to another shoemaker. So I asked the shoemaker if he could send the mould (do you call it like this?) to the new shoemakers, which seemed logical and efficient. Something about not reinventing the wheel or doing double work ...

The shoemaker did not want to send his mould to his colleague He explained that every shoemaker has his own way of working, there are subtle differences in how you approach it. He would never want to work with a mould made by his colleague, but rather create a new one. His mould of the same foot will be quite different. This surprised me, it seemed so logical to share the mould as an outsider. It got me thinking again about how hard it is to share materials between professionals, and learn from each other's unique way of working. I once taught a course with the curriculum of another teacher, but found myself adjusting many things and almost wished I started from scratch. Although the practice of trainers, for example, looks alike for outsiders, there are many subtle differences that make the work of a professional unique. With a colleague we like to make prezis together and I notice that it is still hard to explain a hard made by a colleague you know really well.

This week I facilitated the third session of a community of practice. One participant told me that he had really connected with two other participants. They share a lot with each other and talk about all their projects. I strongly believe it take a sustained interaction over a longer time frame in order to be able to really learn from each other. This is the only one way to learn how another professional tackles the same challenges. Though I had the impression this shoemaker did not really want to learn something from his colleagues - he knows just how how he wants to work.

Roles in communities of practice

Does a learning community or community of practice need roles to function well? Should you officially assign these roles to people or is it best if people spontaneously fullfil certain roles? What about the self-organising power of communities? On the 29th of March we did a session (we = Sibrenne Wagenaar en Joitske Hulsebosch) about roles in networked learning. We thought it would be nice to share some of our thinking in this blogpost.


Starting with ourselves .... we have a small, starting network of people who all in some way use social media in learning processes and training. Roles are not explicitly named and assigned because it is a starting and spontaneous process. Since we have taken the initiative to invite people we feel more responsible for the ins and outs of this network, but others also take initiatives and propose activities. We talk regularly with members informally, take initiative to convene a meeting f2f, start an online brainstorming, make sure invitations are available for online webinars. But basically anyone can take the initiative to start operations and that happens.
This raises the question ... can it help to formalize roles and assign certain roles to members in a network? And when do formal roles get in the way of spontaneous self-organisation? A more formal roles gives you a certain focus and responsibility that makes it clear how you (are supposed to) contribute to a network. The art in network learning is often this can be combined with other existing work tasks and having a formalised role may help to ensure the learning community doesn't get 'off the radar'. It is crucial that the contents of the network relevant to you and in line with other work you do to prevent the network tasks from falling off the list, but having an explicit role can certainly also contribute.

In this blog post we talk about a learning network or community of practice as a group of people who interact and engage with each other to collectively learn based on a common interest or shared issue and on a fairly explicit manner form a network, offline, online or in a combination of online and offline interaction.

What roles can you distinguish?There are many different classifications of roles in learning networks. The Ruud de Moor Centrum has recently developed a great networked learning toolkit and formulated six important roles, spread over an internal and external focus. There are two more sources that we like to share with you: Eric Davidov's roles and roles described by Michael Fontaine.

Ruud de Moor Centrum (toolkit netwerkleren)	Eric Davidove (blogpost)	Michael Fontaine (online article)
Internal roles: 1. Coordinator; responsible for planning 2. Inspirator; the creative brain of the network 3. Creator; makes sure knowledge products are produced Externe rollen: 1. Coach; supports the self-organising function of the network 2. ICT-coach; supports working online 3. Ambassador is supporting and advocating the need for the learning network	1. Consumer: the person who looks for and uses content, information, and social connections. 2. Creator: The person who creates, shares, improves, and discusses content and information. 3. Connector: The person who helps others to find the content, information, and people they seek or need. 4. Carrier: The person who helps creators to transmit and promote their content and information to others. 5. Caretaker: The person who manages the learning community.	1. Subject matter expert 2. Core team member 3. Community member 4. Leader 5. Sponsor 6. Facilitator 7. Content coordinator 8. Journalist 9. Mentor 10. Events coordinator 11. Technologist

We provide these three categories not to compare them, but rather to show the variety in thinking about and defining roles. This is not the 'one right list' that will make your learning network perfect. You may develop your own list of roles for your network, inspired by these lists. It is difficult to compare them because they have been described from different perspectives. The list of Ruud de Moor Centre is based on multiple learning networks in a system in which roles are needed external support. Eric Davidov, based on a literature overview, has compiled the most common roles in a Community of Practice. Fontaine has looked at roles and their development in communities in a number of large organizations. In his view, certain roles (eg sponsor, leader, subject matter experts) are important in the early stages of a major network, and over time find it rather obvious shifts. Fascinating to read his article about it!

Formal or informal roles?
There is a difference between a spontaneous role (eg. act as an inspirator and having a formalised role (eg. as the network coordinator or ICT-coach). It may be worthwhile to formalise certain roles to create clarity and to make sure that the responsibilities are anchored somewhere in the network. Playing with roles may help the development of a network. This is true for a coordinator roles, but also for less obvious roles like inspirator or monitor. For instance, Habiforum has three masterroles innovationcoach, procescoach a coach learning and development, see this article by Kranendonk en Kersten. Do you feel a network lacks innovation power? You may decide to assign an innovation coach.

We are personally convinced that a role should fit somebody's talents and preferences. Are you a person taking lots of initiatives, then the role of activator may suit you well. On the other hand it is very well possible that people play different roles in different learning networks, depending on their identification with the network. This was one of the insights that the participants of our session gained through our discussions.

Which role do you often take in communities of practice? Here is a great test to see what your preferential roles are..

Rollen as a lense to look at the functioning of a community of practice
We strongly believe in the self-organizing capacity of a learning network: people with a shared passion come together, communicate and think of organisating activities to jointly engage in. Does it still make sense to think in terms of roles in learning networks? Absolutely, because it offers a particular perspective to a analyze a network, scrutinize its functioning and think of improvements. What type of members fullfil a certain role? What are the weaknesses of the network? Do we miss a certain role? Discussing the roles thus provides a framework for a discussion on how to support the development of the learning network. Based on this discussion, you could decide to assign certain roles more explicitly to a person or a small group of persons, or to rotate roles. It is also valuable to become more aware of certain roles needed. Following a discussion of the roles within a the network, members might decide:

• to assign a role to someone (eg. form a core team);
• to stimulate network members to take up certain role more often based on talent, preferences;
• to switch roles within the network for example to start rotation for a wider variety of ideas;
• to us 'a role analysis' occasionally to reflect on the process in the network.

Roles as lense to look at organizations Finally, the conversation on that day also addressed the potential of using network roles to look at employees in an organization. Rather than thinking always in terms of strict functions, you might think of flexible roles. For instance, you might think in terms of changing, flexible topic leadership rather than thinking about management functions and fixed tasks. This might be part of the more networked organizational form of the future?

Start your online community or network the Tiësto way

Thanks to a column by Dutch management writer Ben Tiggelaar I learned about the working style of DJ Tiësto. He explains: "I start the evening with some different kind of music and various styles to see what is right for the audience. The styles that get the best response, is the way I continue."

I was struck by the similarities in the practices we've developed over the years in starting learning networks, especially online. Typically I propose to start a shorter experimental cycle (maybe 4 weeks, maybe 3 months in the most recent forest landscape restoration trajectory) and at the end discuss whether and how to continue. This is much easier than asking people upfront what activities they would like, since what they state in an interview or survey may work out differently in practice.

We start with a wide range of online activities, like open questions, expert inputs, watching videos, teleconferences, virtual field visits, etc. From the interactions, you can see what kind of topics and what kind of activities are attractive for people. You can observe what triggers the most interest (though you may need statistics too). In every trajectory you see that the balance of interest towards discussing own practices or outside research/expert opinions is different. In some groups, people like to be personal and have a need to discuss their own work. In other groups, they relate more to experts bringing in new perspectives. Long stories may work in one case, but do not resonate in another.

So the key is: experiment and don't be scared to abandon a certain approach!

The dynamics of managing/nurturing networks of practice

Image by D'Arcy Norman via Flickr

I received a beautiful article (thanks to Julie Ferguson!). Just got a tip through the comments that it's also online. This is the full reference to the article:

Agterberg, M., Van den Hooff, B., Huysman, M., & Soekijad, M. (2010). Keeping the Wheels Turning: The Dynamics of Managing Networks of Practice. Journal of Management Studies, 47(1), 85-108

The authors make a distinction between NoPs and CoPs; networks of practice and communities of practice. In their definition CoPs are co-located and NoPs are dispersed. I would not make that distinction, because the closeness between members does not depend on distance, people can really feel part of and identify with a community of practitioners who are based in different location all over the globe.

CoP or NoP doesn't matter, there are important insights into the management interventions to support NoPs (or CoPs I'd say...). The research question was: how can intra-organizational NoPs be managed without being 'killed'? Research has been done in a development organization founded in 1965 and headquartered in the Netherlands (Dutch people can easily guess :). Twenty-two NoPs were formalized with the goal of integrating existing, dispersed knowledge. Management created the formal position of a manager or functional line manager responsible for the NoP. This brings a central dilemma: how to balance emergent self-organization and autonomy on the one hand and some degree of formal management influence on the other hand?

I've never held the belief that communities are fully self-emergent and that you can not intervene/facilitate in communities of practice. Wenger has also written a lot about this management paradox and prefers to call it nurturing rather than managing. Managers should support and energize communities, not neglect and ignore them. (see also my previous post which includes an interview with Wenger).

What are the findings from the study of 22 NoPs in one organisation? Data reveal four sets of dynamics that influence the way NoPs function to integrate dispersed knowledge:

1. Organizational embeddedness- the extent to which the knowledge shared is relevant for the organisation. It includes institutionalization, the extent to which outcomes of the network can be applied in the formal organization as rules, routines, strategies, trainings etc and relevance for the organisation- the extent to which knowledge in the network is considered valuable for the organization.

2. Embeddedness in practice- the extent to which the knowledge being shared and created s relevant to and integrated in members local practices. It includes relevance to practice, as connection to daily local practices and common practices, extent to which the network members use the same practices.

3. Relational embeddedness- the presence of strong social ties. It includes the group feeling, trust, reciprocity as willingness to help each other and face-to-face contact.

4. Structural embeddedness- The structure of connections among people. It includes connectedness and Know who is where and knows what (and how to reach them).

Personally I feel relational and structural embeddedness are very connected to each other and both relate to the level of social capital.

But what did the study find out about management interventions in all these types of embeddedness? Management can enforce the dynamics or degrade the dynamics (which Wenger call 'energize' or 'de-energize'). A few examples of enforcing/energizing interventions:

• Translating experiences into formal publications and training
• Informing members about relevant developments in the domain
• Kick off meetings (to support relational embeddedness)
• Formalizing networks
• Providing tools like the E-group (online tool) and travel money to meet face-to-face
  

A few example of degrading interventions (de-energizing):

• Asking the networks fo formulate strategies (lowers embeddedness in practice)
• Setting the agenda (topics introduced by management were not the topics advisors perceived as relevant)
  
• Requiring specific outputs from the network (lowers embeddedness in practice)
• Making top-down decisions which counter the principles of commitment and organisational learning (lowers trust)
• Giving assignments without focusing on social issues
• Instruct people to attend a network meeting without the interest of advisors to be connected
• Install a network without encouraging advisors to participate
  

In the end, management interventions can have both a reinforcing and degrading effect and it sometimes depends on the context what the effect is. A strong focus on organizational embeddedness denies the practice based and socially embedded nature of learning and turns NoPs into teams.

Another conclusion is that managers "who play the role of primus inter pares seem better able to intervene successfully, but it is no easy task to identify such people." This relates directly to CoP literature indicating that the role of coordinator should be taken up by a practitioner in order to be effective. CoP literature makes a better distinction between the role of the practitioner- coordinator as member of the CoP versus management who are outsiders/sponsors. Nevertheless, I find the list of management interventions very useful, concrete (and even recognisable from experience!).

Facilitating networks and communities: balancing between design and emergent

I live in an area which is relatively newly populated (10 years old) and the shopping center has been opened only last year. Unfortunately most of the roads are designed with cars in mind, rather than cyclists, overlooking the needs of cyclists and people walking. As a result you can see people taking their own roads... (this picture was taken before the snow, currently this path is white from snow and ice!)

I once read a story about architects on a campus waiting to see where the students pass and then building their pathways, rather than designing pathways and then making sure the students stay on those paths. (forgot where..)

Facilitators of networks and communities have a similar dilemma: you have to design and lead, but you also need to see what emerges. The natural self-organisation tendency of networks and communities is very strong. It doesn't mean however that nothing can be designed upfront, but find a right balance.

End of last year I had to write a plan and budget for two networks without really knowing a lot what the pathways of these networks are going to be. I ended up trying to create some flexibility to be able to respond to new pathways. For instance, instead of budgeting for the current online platform a network is using, also take care of other tools that may be needed.

It may also be a task of a facilitator to notice the new pathways.. currently there are many developments on Twitter. Maybe your network is taking a new path on Twitter?

PS. there are two bridges that are going to be redesigned.. the design of the bridge didn't take into account security in traffic and created dangerous situations. I wonder if this wouldn't have been foresee-able and this is not a case of emergent insight but overlooking known facts...

Madeleine Taylor on network weaving

I'm writing an article about challenges in fostering learning networks in education- based on 8 interviews we did last year- the writing is a bit of a long process but we're getting there. What is striking in the interviews is that the role of the coordinator or facilitator is so new to people. Compared to other tasks and working according to a plan, they have to learn to let go and see what emerges. But there is some confusion too, that letting go means doing less or waiting passively till others take initiave. In my experiences it means working hard, but doing more on the background, talking to people, knowing their passions and interests and knowing what will trigger their participation or even lead taking.

On Beth's blog, this blogpost I found this small interview on network weaving. I've never liked the term weaver, it's so domestic somehow... but it does highlight the invisible work on relationships of a network coordinator or facilitator.



Madeleine explains that you have to see connections and the value the connections bring to people. And knowing what connections to promote, because not everyone needs to be connected to everyone. I'd add that you can also do that from a deep understanding of the domain and the cutting-edges of the domain.

Every community of practice should be able to articulate their value

Yesterday I saw an interview with Ron Fouchier, a professor in molecular virology about the search for vaccines for the swine pest (you can still watch the interview with Ron Fouchier in Dutch here). He works for the Erasmus University, one of the centres that will get the virus to start cooking up a vaccin.

What's interesting is how he phrased the collaboration with other centres. In the case of SARS, they were one of the 6-7 centres of excellence working to find a vaccine. He calls it a 'fair competition' between the centres whereby the Erasmus had won some 'small competitions'. I can imagine the centres are in close contact, but try to be smarter than the others. You could see them as a community of practice, exchanging information and ideas and trying to innovate. Or you could see it as a project team with a clear aim- finding the vaccin.

What strikes me is that he could so clearly articulate the resulting benefit of the process. In the end, they will contribute to public health by finding a vaccine that will help control the swine flu. Nobody will contest the fact that they need to collaborate and exchange.

In a lot of communities of practice though, participants find it hard to articulate the benefits. As a result, exchange in the communities is sometimes seen by managers and sponsors as unnecessary waste of the practitioners time. In this case, it is amazingly clear, and it would be weird if anybody would object to exchange of information. Not in all communities it might be possible to stress the added value so clearly, and to have such a compelling goal. Nevertheless, I think it is important to try and make a similar case. Which vaccine are you hoping to develop with your community of practice? What will this bring to your organisations and sponsors?

Launch of communities and networks connections website

Tony Karrer and Nancy White have been collaborating to make the communities and networks connection website which brings content from various places the web together on the topic of communities and networks. Today is the official launch. My blog will be part of the network of blogs feeding into the website. I'm happy that I'm part of it because I seem to be doing a lot of different things, but this is the core of my work and expertise.

The site is similar in structure to the elearning site. I'm not sure how I will use the site, but I guess I will add the feed of the site to my RSS reader. As Tony mentions: "it is a network to form something that's not quite a community. I see it as being aimed at the 95% of people who don't subscribe to blogs but are interested in this content. It's a way they can more easily find that content. It's also an aide to bloggers in terms of organizing their content."

Ofcourse you can also use the search function or the sidebar to find bloggers you didn't know yet, like the endless knots weblog. Or search on the left sidebar to find content on a particular topic like twitter. Just click and try!

Networks for Humanitarian Aid

On Saturday I did a session about networks and communities of practice for the alumni of the NoHA masters. The NoHA masters is an eighteen months course in international humanitarian assistance, co-organised by 7 European universities. Since their interests in networking were very broad; including personal networking strategies, network facilitation and working with networks in the field of humanitarian aid, I started with an exercise about self-organisation and an introductory presentation. In the exercise I asked 10 volunteer to line themselves up according to ascending age. This was easy for them to do, and shows the self-organising power of humans. If you understand this, you will work differently with networks.

Presentatie Noha

View more presentations from joitske. (tags: aid practice)

After this, we discussed in smaller groups on the basis of various questions. How are we using networks in our work for humanitarian aid? How could we leverage them more? What are the pitfalls? And what are our personal network strategies? In my group, I noticed that not everyone is convinced that you can learn how to network. I don't consider myself a natural networker, but I've learn to network professionally. An interesting case was shared of a coordination meeting between humanitarian aid organisations that continues for years, and doesn't not seem to yield much value to the participants in terms of learning and innovation. Ofcourse, coordination is necessary, but it would be an interesting challenge to see how we could make more of those routine/boring gatherings that all participants see as an obligation.

Afterwards I had nice discussions with the leading committee of the alumni association. Their biggest challenge is to foster ties between the different years and to focus on the practice when members are working at many different levels, varying from field to policy level. Miguel from Spain raised the cultural differences at national level. Cultures (at national but also organisational levels) differ in their inclination towards professional networks and associations and the types of networks you invest in. In Spain for instance, the kinship networks (families) are very important and people invest quite some time in those. In the Netherlands, associations thrive and it is common to take up a voluntary position.

Building healthy communities

Richard McDermott write the cover story of inside knowledge on the topic of building healthy communities. A three years in-depth assessment was undertaken in a dozen companies to look at mature communities. Interestingly, old thinking about CoPs was that goals and deliverables woud inhibit people's openess and that communities needed to evolve on their own over time. However, the study found that many communities without organisational support fade away. Most of the healthy communities are more like 'official' organisational structures.

Key characteristics of healthy communities were consistent across the various industries studied. Following are some characteristics:

• Most active communities are also highly valued by their organisations
• Projects, goals and deliverables give a community something specific to organise around
• Healthy communities have enthusiastic, active, energised leaders, spending between 10-25% of their time engaged in community activities
• Leader activities include facilitating meetings, handling logistics, networking among members and networking among sponsors
• Healthy communities have a core group of active members
• They have a clear sense of making progress, even if goals are informally formulated, which energises the community
• Healthy communities are far from the margins of a company even though management attention can easily inhibit community development.
• Some communities are developing the organisation's knowledge assets

I think this is interesting, as I also encounter the belief that communities should be left alone in organisations. What I observe is that this marginalizes them, because there is no attention for learning from the community of practice. For inter-organisational communities (as I'm now mostly engaged with) it is even less likely that an organisation is closely involved. Though this may create the space for authentic development, is can also be interpreted as lack of interest in the domain of the community. Good to read the whole paper, it is not very long and gives a very pragmatic insight in communities within companies.

Defining the domain of a community.

Nancy White has a good blogpost about domain definition. I belief domain defintion is one of many powerful interventions that a coordinator/facilitator or advisor in a community of practice can make. Domain definition or re-definition can help a group to articulate the domain they are interested in and strengthen their focus and become attractive for newcomers. But what is a domain? Is it the same as topic or theme? Nancy provides the definition of Etienne Wenger:

A community of practice is not merely a club of friends or a network of
connections between people. It has an identity defined by a shared domain of
interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people. (You could
belong to the same network as someone and never know it.) The domain is not
necessarily something recognized as “expertise” outside the community. A youth
gang may have developed all sorts of ways of dealing with their domain:
surviving on the street and maintaining some kind of identity they can live
with. They value their collective competence and learn from each other, even
though few people outside the group may value or even recognize their
expertise.

From the definition you can see that a community of practice is a special type of network, one with a focus on its domain. By interacting, the members are forging common ideas and practices around their domain, and may achieve -slowly- innovation. Slowly, because there is a stage whereby the members need time to exchange and establish the common ground and bridge differences. You have to know what exists before you can innovate. What I can add from my experience is that there are no hard rule for domain definition. Yet, it is best if the domain is not so vast, that you start drowning and get too wide a group of interested people. On the other hand, it should not be so narrow that it becomes like a problem. You may have a 'name' and a 'description' for instance the e-collaboration community focusses on 'how to guide the introduction of e-tools into development organisations in a way that it improves collaboration (north-north and south-south) in development cooperation.' Probably 'teleconferences' would have been too narrow a focus and 'using ICTs' too wide a focus - in this particular case.

Conversations in communities of practice

I had dinner with a friend and suddenly we were discussing how to do the laundry. It made us laugh because we never discuss how to do the laundry. Basically over dinner, we always cover our work (and what doesn't work in work), work/life balance, gossiping over other friends, children and sometimes a bit of politics. Did you ever notice that with certain friends or colleagues you always cover the same topics, though with variations on how you cover it? I once saw the play 'Painicilline' by Alex d'Electrique where 3 scientists are nominated for a price and waiting for the result. It takes long and you see a pattern of conversation between the 3 men that gets repeated and repeated. The same topics come up and get discussed in just a slightly different way.

In communities of practice, the same phenomenon occurs. The same topics are covered and others become 'undiscussables' or simple 'not discussed'. A facilitator can play a role in introducing new subjects of conversation, by changing the medium, inviting new participants or inviting new experts to interact with the community.

Communities of practice and bulldozers

CPsquare invited Mark Bennett of Rio Tinto to talk in a teleconference about his experiences with fostering communities of practice within Rio Tinto, an international company. I missed the call because I thought GMT= London time, but I discovered that London is not the same as Greenwich. Fortunately, the call was recorded and I could listen to it while driving around. Since I was driving, I couldn't take any notes. However, I recall that Mark Bennett said that a good definition of the domain can be very compelling and attract new members to a community like a magnet. This is something I have observed too. The definition and formulation of the domain is an intervention that contributes (with lots of other factors) to the success of a community of practice. The definition should be such that people recognise it as one of their own interests. He further talked about the place of community builders and knowledge managers in the organisation. Research and development, human resource department or IT department? ?The last seems to be the worst option.

You can see a video he used to demonstrate the value of the community of practice here. It took quite an investment to make the video because he wanted to be absolutely sure that the innovation worked. The video tells the story of a coalmine in Australia with problems with bulldozer brakes. They used collaborative forums to ask for advice. They found out that two engineers in other parts of the world had experienced similar problems and had already solved them.

From a meeting to a community of practice: lessons from the ecollaboration community facilitation

From a meeting to a community of practice - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: From a meeting to a community of practice

Sibrenne Wagenaar and I co-facilitated the inter-organizational ecollaboration learning community for two years, basically from a meeting to a community of practice. Since there seems to be an interest to better understand what facilitating a learning community from a communities of practic theory means we decided to document our actions, observations and reflections in a wiki. We used those meticulous observations to describe our way of facilitating this learning communities. Maybe because of our own enthousiasm, or because of the detailed documentation, the article has become rather long: 20 pages. It was accepted by the Journal of the International Association of Facilitators and can be found online here, but you have to be a member to access it there. The full citation is:

Wagenaar, S., & Hulsebosch, J. (2008). From 'a meeting' to 'a learning community' Community of Practice theory-informed facilitation of an inter-organizational community of practice: the case of the e-collaboration learning community. Group Facilitation: A Research and Applications Journal, 9, 4-25

Fortunately we are allowed to make it available more widely. Therefore I have uploaded it using Scribd (I first tried Edocr, but that didn't work) and you should be able to access it through this link.

We explain 11 principles that we have tried to put into practice. I think some of these principles are make it clear that facilitating a community of practice is not the same as facilitating a workshop or training, it's a different art. We tried to make it 10 or 7, but couldn't manage to reduce the number!

1. Act as learning facilitator-practitioner
2. Co-facilitate to reduce blind spots
3. Embed learning in actual practices
4. Stimulate self-organisation
5. Facilitate conversations in public and private spaces
6. Use the variety in the community
7. Balance the focus on tangible and intangible products
8. Guide meta-level reflections
9. Distinguish between two layers of practice in the learning community: the level of individual practices, and the level of collaborative practices
10. Manage sponsor relationships
11. Manage the boundaries

In search of germs

On June 2nd, with a group of CoP enthousiasts, we organised a working conference about communities of practice in the Netherlands, which was attended by roughly 75 people. I had the impression not everyone who has experience working with this concept was present, but it's a good start. The start of the day worked well, everyone was handed a quartet card, and had to find the other 3 people to form a quartet. This offered a nice way to start networking, and lateron in the day, we came back to this group to reflect on our experiences. In the picture you see my quartet.

With Sibrenne Wagenaar, I facilitated the 'facilitation circle'. I enjoyed it very much. Though a lot of people are searching for 'how to facilitate a CoP' there were also some people with interesting experiences. The dilemma between 'sturen en loslaten' - 'steering versus let go' appeared to be a key theme for most of the participants. In the afternoon the term 'kiemkracht' - 'germinal force' was coined to represent the seed that you are looking for when you start facilitating. Without germinal force you may start pulling a dead horse and that's not fun!

From my experience I would see the following 4 signals to identify germinal force:

Signal 1: If a group of practitioners are together, conversations flow spontaneously and hardly need any facilitation. The exchange generates energy, it is an endogeneous process.

Signal 2: Different actors have a stake to innovate practices, the actors can be practitioners or sponsors of the CoP or both.

Signal 3: Practitioners are passionate about the domain, and have a personal connection with it, but may be working in relative isolation. One or several persons have a vision that working together may catalyze innovation.

Signal 4: There is already an informal network around the domain of the community, but there is no effort to systematically exchange and generate knowledge. There are possibilities to improve knowledge creation and innovation in practice.

In case of organisational CoPs, you could add a fifth signal:

Signal 5: The domain of the CoP is of strategic importance for the mission of the organisation

Any ideas? Do you need a Yes to all signals in order to invest or are there situations where you can work on a CoP without one of these germinal forces?

If we would use these signals to analyze the germinal force for a community of practice about communities of practice in the netherlands, you can say that signals 1, 3 and 4 are strong, but signal 2 is weak, there isn't really an organisation or actor with a strong interest to innovate CoP practices within the Netherlands.

Bridging and bonding in communities of practice

I read in the newspaper that ethnically mixed neighbourhoods have lower levels of trust in general. This was already proven by a research by Putnam in 2007. Dronkers and Lancee repeated the research in the Netherlands and reached the same conclusion. BUT the inter-ethnical level of trust in heterogeneous neighbourhoods is higher than in the others. Which is kind-of logical: when you meet people from other ethnic groups you are likely to see that they can be kind and friendly too. In the homogeneous neighbourhoods, the social trust is higher, but the image of different ethnic groups can be very negative.


It sounds like a description of my old and new neighbourhood! I moved last year from a homogeneous village to a mix area of the Hague.


What really triggered me to blog about it was the coining of two terms: bonding social capital and bridging social capital. I recently attended a ecollaboration meeting where the people with developer skills were in the lead because of the topic chosen for the meeting: open source. As non-developer I could see how interesting it was for them to connect. On the other hand, if you don't pay attention, you get a reinforcing loop towards the developers side of the domain of ecollaboration. It was suddenly very obvious to me that the role of a facilitator of a community of multidisciplinary practice includes balancing the bonding and bridging social capital. Try to make sure that there is enough space for bonding between the disciplines, but include sufficient bridging capital. That sounds quite abstract, but I think it means being aware of the member who play a bridging role and enabling them to continue to play the bridging role. At times this may not need any intervention, at times, this may need some attention.

Secondly, since we facilitated the community of practice with a group of four non-developers, it might have been easy to overlook the needs of developers to connect and discuss at their level of interest. So whenever possible, try to have a balanced core group too.

Pro-ana as a community of practice

In the Dutch news there was an item about the so-called 'pro-ana sites'. Websites that connect girls with anorexia. The pro-ana movement believes their behaviour is not disease but a lifestyle. 25% of the anorexia girls/women under medical treatment visit the pro-ana sites, often weblogs. The three girls who were interviewed in the news explained that they were really attracted by the sites and the tips they can get on the sites eg. about 'how to avoid eating', 'how to cheat your parents'. One of them did not identify with the site during her first visit because the girls were too skinny. But later she was attracted to come back. Another girl could spend 3 hours per day on the websites. They feel the sites are dangerous because of the enormous appeal to the anorexia girls and the way the girls on the websites stimulate eachother with tips to give in to their obsession to avoid food, on a downward journey. You can still watch the interview with 3 girls in Dutch here.

Though I originally did not think of patient communities as communities of practice because they do not have a professional practice, I currently think you might think of them as one. Look at the way of living of the pro-ana members and they way they behave: a very strong practice. You can see that the websites give enormous power to the pro-ana communities. At the same time, it is an enormous reminder that communities of practice are not something good and to be promoted everywhere. It depends on the practices, the innovation etc. whether a communities can be labelled as good and should be encouraged or discouraged. The pro-ana community seems to do well in helping new entrants to get up to the task. However, the practice is horrible (no photos to match this blogpost...!)

The difference between communities of practice and action learning

Tomorrow I'm going to present the difference between the theories of communities of practice and action learning (and between the communities themselves and action-reflection groups). I haven't found any materials comparing the two, so I had to do some brainwork for myself. This table summarizes what I intend to present. (CoP = community of practice, AL = Action Learning). Any input welcome!

Characteristic	CoP	AL
Is	A theory, little information on methods	A methodology, less detailed theory
Goal	Stewarding a knowledge domain	Problem solving
Participation	Varying levels of voluntary participation	Fixed group over period of time
Activities	Mix of learning activities	Focus on reflection and questions
Expertise	Distributed Expertise Leadership	Peer-to-Peer
Period	CoP life stages	Determined period of time

How can blogs support communities of practice?

(Cartoon via tangwailing blog)

I observed that Stan Garfield blogs about questions he receives or overhears about knowledge management. That made me think that I could blog some of the questions I get (+ the answers). One of them was: how can blogs support communities of practice?

1. A community of practice can have a public teamblog. An example of a teamblog is the ecollaboration weblog . It works for the community to document face-to-face meetings, and makes it publicly known. In a discussion about the future of the community, it came up as an object of identification with the community. It is not easy to keep it going. For instance, it would be great if members would post more blogs sharing their experiences with ecollaboration and reflections, but it's not priority for people.

2. A weblog with summaries of discussions can be a repository for the community. An example is the weblog Everything you always wanted to know about capacity development . It is a weblog from ICCO capacity building advisor. The discuss cases in a password-protected environment. The cases are summarized in a depersonalized matter. Besides a repository, it is also a boundary crossing tool, as it is publicly available. In this case, the first posts were done by me as a facilitator, since this was a new way of working for the group and hard to explain. When they saw it, they were enthusiastic and were inspired enough to continue. It feels like a 'product' of discussions which may seem intangible.

3. Individual member weblogs can stimulate individual practice reflections, but can also act as means to open up practices to others. CPsquare offers an RSS feed that aggregates all blogposts by its members. This can be a way of making the weblogs more visible.

4. Blogging communities have blogs as their main means of communication. Nancy White has written an article about blogging communities called: Launching a new paradigm for online community. She distinguishes 3 types of blogging communities:
1. The single blog/blogger centric community with the power vested in the central blogger.
2. The Central connecting topic community which is a community that arises between blogs linked by a common passion or topic.
3. The boundaried communities like myspaces or multiply where members register and join and are are offered the chance to create a blog.

For more about blogging communities you can watch Nancy White presenting on this topic (she is talking through webcam!) in this video