Communities

communities of interest and practice

Skills 2.0 redux

by

We are now in the second week of our Summer Camp on informal and social learning. The first week’s assignment was to read and comment on an article I wrote in 2008. I wondered what had changed in the last four years and if these thoughts were still pertinent. Here’s what I asked:

  • What has changed?
  • What has not?
  • Do you agree with the thoughts here?
  • What do you think are Skills 2.0, or perhaps even Skills 3.0, for you, your colleagues and your fields of expertise?

One participant said that, “This article is as pertinent to 2012 as to 2008.” Another wrote: One of my favourite quotes from the article is “Being a learning professional is becoming more about your network than your current knowledge.” 

I have noticed with my writing here over the past eight years that timing is very important. Some articles get little notice when originally posted and then are picked up by the network many years later. It’s one reason I never close commenting on my posts. You never know what might be of interest.

Here is the article, Skills 2.0 (PDF).

Communities of practice enable the integration of work and learning

by

COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE

  • Our world is getting more complex as everything gets connected.
  • Complex problems require more implicit knowledge, which cannot be codified.
  • Implicit knowledge can only be shared through conversations & observation.
  • Collaborative and distributed work is becoming the norm.
  • Knowledge-sharing and narration of work make implicit knowledge more visible, especially in distributed work teams.
  • Transparent work processes foster innovation.
  • New ideas come from diverse networks, often outside the organization.
  • Learning is part of work, not separate from it.
  • Communities of practice enable the integration of work & learning.

So what is a community of practice? Maybe we should start with what it is not:

  • It is not a help desk filled with subject matter experts.
  • It is not a work group, or even task focused.
  • One is not appointed by management to join a community of practice.

Some characteristics of communities of practice:

  • People want to join them.
  • They usually have a higher purpose, that one person alone cannot achieve.
  • People feel affinity for their communities of practice.
  • There are both strong and weak social ties.
  • You know you are in a community of practice when it changes your practice.

community-of-practice-change

I came, I saw, I learnt

by

What better article to read this past week than 11 lessons about digital communities from Rome by Courtney Hunt.

  1. Capitalize on proven, older designs.
  2. Build the new upon the old.
  3. Sometimes you have to destroy the old to make way for the new.
  4. The past can teach about process (people don’t change).
  5. Rules are only guides.
  6. Sometimes not enforcing rules allows the system to find its own pragmatic balance.
  7. Intimacy and humanity can overcome many design and resource flaws.
  8. Technology does not have to be alienating.
  9. Taking the time to make things beautiful reaps long term benefits.
  10. Manage signal to noise.
  11. People are ingenious.
Sunset at St Peter’s

I was confused on my arrival in Rome, easily getting lost in the labyrinth of streets and alleys in the old city. Hans de Zwart showed me how to let go and learn to flow with the traffic and street patterns. It became much easier, and on the last night I strolled the several kilometers, without a map, back to my hotel. I think many people feel confused at first in online communities. It’s up to the community to help them feel the flow.

The humanity of Rome was also quite surprising, especially after reading all the tourist warnings for the city. Even though there are places filled with vendors of cheap crap trying to take advantage of tourists, for the most part it’s like being in a bunch of connected neighbourhoods. Almost everyone I met was friendly and all merchants were courteous, polite and honest to a fault. One fellow tourist, an older gentleman from Australia, told me that he stopped a pick-pocket who was trying to lift his wallet, on the train. He cried out and grabbed the thief’s hand. As the train came to a stop, the locals on the train created a wall and forced the thief out, while at the same time calling for the police. They then apologized on behalf of their city. Rome is a community that keeps on trying, in spite of its challenges, because its people believe in the city.

Rome: public water fountain

Too often we focus on the technology and not the human relationships in online communities. Rome, and many other physical communities, can give us some insights on where to put our priorities. David Griffiths offers some good questions that anyone supporting online professional communities should ask.

“Community or Network?   Organic or stagnant?  Are you focused on solving the problem, or what lies behind the problem?  Reactive or Proactive? Ask yourself, what is the purpose for CoP and how do you know if they are working?”

An online community should be much more than a place for economic man to get things done  (collaborate). A community needs the attracting power of a greater sense of purpose so that people will regularly try to do the right thing for the long term benefit of all (cooperate). We can learn something from a city that is 2,765 years old.

Beyond collaboration

by

In A Wicked Problem, I said that all levels of complexity exist in our world but more and more of our work deals with real complex problems (in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect), whether they be social, technological, or economic. Complex environments and problems are best addressed when we organize as networks, work to continuously develop emergent practices; and cooperate to advance our aspirations.

Jay Rosen talks about covering wicked problems and describes how journalists could address this “beat”. I think that these approaches align quite well with my Collaboration/Cooperation – Work/Learning framework, based on the working smarter  graphic here.

Rosen says that the beat must be global and networked. This is why we must cooperatively engage in external social networks to understand the complexity of wicked problems. He also talks about the need for narrative, pattern-based understanding of multiple disciplines, and becoming a learning machine. This is the role that communities of practice can play. They are more constrained spaces, yet  still open to diversity of opinion. Work teams, filled with experts, remain good at solving Tame Problems, or those that can be constrained.

Rosen’s is one more perspective on the need to reframe our work structures to incorporate intentional connections beyond traditional business. The answers lie outside, not inside, the organization. As Rosen concludes:

The wicked problems beat is not a View from Nowhere thing. It starts from the limits of professional expertise. It is a reflection on unmanageable complexity. It preaches humility to the authorized knowers. It mocks the one best answer and single issue people. It seeks to deliver us from denial.

Organizations need to extend the notion of work beyond collaboration, beyond teams, and beyond the corporate fire wall. They need to make social networks, communities of practice, and narrative part of the work. It’s a big leap but we need to change the business conversation away from confident military terms (target market, strategic plan, marketing campaign) and instead talk in terms of complexity, wicked problems and cooperation. As Rosen writes, “Cliché is the vernacular in its spent state. Savage clarity is the vernacular coming alive again.” Let’s bring some savage clarity to the modern enterprise.

Cooperation as a strategy

by

Martin Nowak, a mathematical biologist, concludes The Evolution of Cooperation with the following winning strategy:

What I find very interesting in these games of conditional reciprocity, direct and indirect reciprocity, we can make the point that winning strategies have the following three properties:  they must be generous, hopeful and forgiving.

Generous in the following sense: if I have a new interaction, now I realize (and this is I think where most people go wrong) that this is not a game where it’s either the other person or me who is winning. Most of our interactions are not like a tennis game in the US Open where one person loses and one person goes to the next round. Most of our interactions are more like let us share the pie and I’m happy to get 49 percent, but the pie is not destroyed. I’m willing to make a deal, and sometimes I accept less than 50 percent. The worst outcome would be to have no deal at all. So in that sense, generous means I never try to get more than the other person.  Tit-for-tat never wins in any single encounter; neither does Generous Tit-for-tat.

Hopeful is that if there is a new person coming, I start with cooperation. My first move has to be cooperation. If a strategy starts with defection, it’s not a winning strategy.

And forgiving, in the sense that if the other person makes a mistake, there must be a mechanism to get over this and to reestablish cooperation.

This strategy aligns with my thoughts on how cooperation differs from collaboration. To be generous, hopeful, and forgiving  will in the long run make for stronger networks and communities. It works in nature, as Nowak shows.

cooperation

In the beginning was the blog

by

Chris Brogan, co-author of Trust Agents, has a number of insights on blogging and engaging online. I have been blogging here for eight years and before that experimented with a few other blogs. I thought I’d compare my experience with Brogan’s recent 21 point primer for blogging.

First of all, I strongly agree with the first 14 points, which basically say that you should focus on a topic/theme, write regularly and develop your own style through practice. At Rule #15, Brogan says that, “My best (most popular) posts were the ones I spent the least time writing“. I have had the opposite experience. My popular posts are the long detailed ones that can double as white papers. For example, one of my most popular posts for 2012 is Three Principles for Net Work (1,500 words). My most visited post last year was Learning, Complexity and the Enterprise (5,300 words). Each of these took a while to write. They were not done in half an hour.

This reinforces Brogan’s Rule #21, “There’s not a single rule on this list that isn’t breakable. Break all the rules you want and enjoy yourself.” As we start the Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop this week, the topic of blogs has already come up. For me, this blog is a central part of my online sense-making. I know that for others, a blog is not the best medium. However, you will never know until you try. Social media are like languages; they take practice to develop mastery.

My experience shows that only a small percentage of the population will take to blogging. When the only online social media were blogs, we all thought they were wonderful; and they are. But other media, like Twitter, have shown greater participation levels. I usually recommend micro-blogging as a start to online sense-making. The benefits are visible quicker and the effort is not as great. No single medium is best for everyone and today people have many choices. As much as I value blogging, I would not try to get everyone doing it. There are a lot of dead blogs floating around the Web. I hope their owners are still engaging online, perhaps with videos, slideshows, or podcasts. On the Internet, the written word is no longer our only option, and that’s a good thing.

The work of many

by

In Twitter and the Law of the Few, I mused how Twitter as a social network can be great for Connectors, Mavens & Salespeople. Later, in adapting to a networked world, I concluded that Mavens can deeply understand a situation, Connectors are needed to get the word out, while Salespeople have to convince those in control to take action. All three are needed to mobilize a network. I then looked at this from the perspective of spreading social capitalism. Generally, Mavens exhibit the greatest intellectual capital; Connectors have the most diverse (creative) networks and Salespeople get things done. I wondered if this metaphor/model could help to get social capitalism “across the chasm”. You could first identify sufficient Mavens, Connectors & Salespeople (it seems that all three are needed) and then build up to the 10% critical mass necessary to effectively spread ideas.

Dave Gray has a written about the anatomy of a network and the work of Ron Burt. Dave states that, “The power of an individual node in any network can be considered along three dimensions: Degree, closeness and betweenness”, and then explains this with one of his great sketches:

Degree: (number of connections) Is this a major attribute of Connectors?

Closeness: (how easily a node can connect with other nodes) Is this a major attribute of Salespeople?

Betweenness: (the degree to which a node forms a critical link to other nodes) Is this a major attribute of Mavens?

Dave concludes that:

Thus, the most powerful person or organization in any network is one that has a high number of potential connections, all of which which are relatively close and thus easily accessible, while at the same time enjoying a position within the network such that it can choose to block or grant access to other nodes.

That “powerful person” is likely three or more people, as Dave notes when he says, “person or organization”. This highlights the importance of cooperation and collaboration for net work, in my opinion. It is not often that one person is simultaneously a Maven, a Connector, and a Salesperson. In a network, the work of many is needed.

A new view on lurkers

by

For several years, there has been a rule-of-thumb, called “90-9-1”, that 90% of online participation in groups/communities consists of “lurkers” or more politely, “passive participants”, and only 1% are active creators. Jacob Nielsen’s 2006 post on Participation Inequality provides a good overview of this phenomenon.

All large-scale, multi-user communities and online social networks that rely on users to contribute content or build services share one property: most users don’t participate very much. Often, they simply lurk in the background.

In contrast, a tiny minority of users usually accounts for a disproportionately large amount of the content and other system activity.

A recent BBC survey of 7,500 people shows significantly different results.

Here we see that passive lurkers make up only 23% of participants; active (intense) participants have increased to 17%; and there is now an “Easy” group in the middle who, “ … respond largely to the activity of others. This includes replying, ‘liking’ and rating, all activities where there’s little effort, exposure or risk.”

Perhaps the most interesting finding is that many early adopters, those who used to be active online, are dropping out and are classified as “passive”. I’m not sure if they are actually dropping out or have just moved on to other media and communities.

One conclusion I would make is that in 2012 it is now easier to get people engaged in online participation, whether for work or pleasure. This is the Facebook effect, which I have noticed since the service became mainstream. With a concrete model of what a social network looks like, people can more easily understand online communities. Of course, there comes a saturation point which many of us have faced as we add social networks to our lives. The YASNS effect [“Yet Another Social Networking Service” ~ Clay Shirky] is also becoming ubiquitous.

If nothing else, this report indicates that social media are making people more social online. The medium is the message, or so it seems.

Etiquette for sharing

by

Many people like to share things online. Twitter is full of links to other websites. For a long time you needed to use URL shorteners to ensure you stayed within Twitter’s 140 character limit. There are now many to choose from, including open source and full-service analytics. Now Twitter has its own URL shortener – t.co – that converts every link that is shared. This is so Twitter can analyze all of this sharing and then sell the aggregated information.

One problem with using a third-party URL shortener with Twitter is that you are adding another potential point of failure in the link. I now copy & paste the full URL into Twitter, and it auto-shortens the link. There is only one potential point of failure and people can see the original URL as ALT text. This is user-friendly and respectful to readers.

Many people like to analyse what happens with their online activity and use tracking tools. For example, if your site exports its RSS feed using something like Google’s Feedburner, then the link people click on in their aggregators has extra information attached; so you can be tracked. I think it’s very rude to pass on these kinds of links and I always clean these URL’s before sharing them. All you need to do is delete everything after the question mark (in bold):

… tryingtotrackyou.com/?utm_source=feedburner …

I use Google Analytics on this site and understand why people want to see their social media traffic. However, it is easy for users to block these services, just like using pop-up blockers. My RSS feeds are clean and I provide a full-feed so I don’t force people to come to my site to read an article, just so I can increase my traffic. I think it’s important to share as openly as possible. I appreciate full feeds and clean URL’s as a reader.

Recently I have noticed another layer of complication being imposed by those who share links. Not only are tracking URL’s used, but these links go to another third-party site, like paper.li or tumblr.com which usually add no additional context for the reader. Often they are just clippings of the original website so the reader has to find the link to the original to read the complete article. All of these services are adding additional points of failure. If these services go down, as many do, then the chain is broken.

My intention with this post is to explain why it’s important to understand some of the technical aspects of how the web is working so we can do what people do best – be social. Please don’t be unintentionally anti-social. I would also be interested if there are any other common anti-social online practices that should be stopped.

Etiquette at the Ball for the Victorians of London Society

Boundaries are for learning

by

Opportunity lies at the edge of systems. Real value creation happens at the edge of organizations. That’s also where we find learning opportunities. Understanding the role of boundaries in human systems can also give us ways to take advantage of them for learning, as Kathia Laszlo writes in Reflecting on Boundaries: Who is teaching and who is learning?

“The boundaries of a system are part of its structure. There are structures that are enabling and others that are limiting. There is a delicate balance between openness and safe space. Diversity is healthy, but with certain limits. As systems thinkers, observing and reflecting on the role of the boundaries is an important practice. We need to remember that social systems are human creations. We must recover our power as social systems designers in order to reconfigure those boundaries and enable new and more life-affirming interactions.”

For example communities of practice can be bridges between our work teams and our loose social networks. Perhaps the boundaries between each of these systems — teams, communities, networks —  can be used for learning opportunities as well.

Think of opportunities to open doors between the work space and the looser dialogue in communities of practice. Bringing in specific examples from the work space to the community is another opportunity for learning. Finding new metaphors and models in our social networks and discussing these within the context of our community of practice can foster innovation. Perhaps there are roles in communities of practice that can be used in your work teams. Maybe looser social network protocols will revitalize a community of practice. Think about where the boundaries are and their influence on learning.

None of this is profound, but I think it’s helpful for community managers and facilitators: guide people to the boundaries to get new ideas to flow in and out. As Kathia writes:

“How can I facilitate the evolution of this organization or community?” is a question I frequently ask myself. And often I find that the answer to this question relies on my ability to expand the boundaries of the system so that we can move from either/or to both/and. If in the old system there where those who teach and those who learn, how can we create a culture in which everybody teaches and everybody learns? How can we move beyond acquiring knowledge to creating meaning? How can we collaborate rather than work against each other?