The collaboration-cooperation figure hits the nail on the head from where I sit in my support role for a community of practice. I’ve experienced that fostering cooperative opportunities is beginning to spark and inspire more fruitful and satisfying collaborative opportunities.

In the past few years, my community of practice has struggled a bit with how to be a community of practice. The focus, initially, was predominately focused on collaborative outputs the community of practice would produce (historically, outputs have been my organizations strength/language). However, from the beginning, even though we (CoP members) thought we knew each other well enough from annual meetings, etc., we could never get to producing the collaborative works. I think part of this is because we weren’t fostering cooperative learning together frequently enough through the community of practice.

Now, after several years of practicing cooperative learning as a primary focus of the CoP (via Webinar and mailing list discussions), we are starting to see some coalescence between the "collaborative" and the "cooperative" bubbling up. I’m sure there are many reason why this is happening, but I think one reason is that we have invoked trust from participants by learning together more frequently, and we are more fluidly realizing (or perhaps re-realizing) common visions, needs, and each person’s individual strengths. This seems to prime us for collaborative work, in that it is much easier to discover the roles and ways people can fit and work together (some of which you could never predict) around common needs and goals when you first learn together in a cooperative nature. I think it also makes people feel more comfortable that when collaborative opportunities do arise they will be able to work collaboratively on a task, rather than held onto a committee of “x” duration!

Thanks for keeping the collaboration-cooperative discussion moving and continually improving the figures. They are great frameworks to refer to for my work!