Communities

communities of interest and practice

Community Driven Renewable Energy

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I’ve been helping to develop the business model for a sustainable energy investment co-operative in the Sackville area. We’re in start-up mode with Renew Coop and the cooperative is recruiting members to show that there is enough interest to attract larger investors. I like the idea of some day living in a completely sustainable region that is not dependent on fluctuating non-renewable resource prices and where there is an overall low impact on the environment.

RenewCoop has been formed to provide small, medium and large investors the opportunity to get involved in the development and ownership of renewable energy projects that directly benefit our region.  The timing is great, because the Government of New Brunswick, under the province’s Renewable Portfolio Standard, wants renewable sources to produce 33 per cent of the energy consumed by New Brunswickers by the year 2016. RenewCoop will be looking at ways to invest in renewable production, with potential projects in Wind Energy Production, Tidal Power Generation, Biodiesel, Hydrogen, Energy Efficiency and Conservation.

Membership costs $25 and we expect shares to be $10 each with a minimum purchase of 5 shares. The cooperative is aiming for 100 members by the end of January. If you’re still thinking about a New Year’s resolution, perhaps investment in sustainable energy is it.

Tools for Communities of Practice

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The CP Squared online conference on Web 2.0 and communities of practice (via Nancy White) will be held during January 2006. In looking at the schedule, which focuses on tools, architecture and applications, I noticed that most of what is being featured is what we (Mancomm Performance) have integrated into a single Elgg application for the Sud-Lanaudière health region in Québec. Using only open source applications, this is the structure that we built:

Blogs & RSS Integral part of Elgg. RSS is very granular.
Wikis Integrated PMWiki each time a new community is created in Elgg
Tagging Automatic or created by the individual with Elgg, including a Tagcloud to see what’s happening
SNA, FOAF & Networking Integral part of Elgg and added an RSS calendar function
Podcasting & Audio Added a web music player to play self-created audio in blog posts
Mashups Nothing applicable
Interoperability Followed open standards so interoperabilty has been relatively easy. Working on connecting directly to Moodle.

This means that you can get an “almost” out of the box integrated community of practice platform that is free and open source. We even had to translate the entire system into French. Techies can connect through the Elgg development community for more information. Of course, the technology is the easy part in building growing a community of practice ;-)

Social Bookmarks

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Instead of adding bookmarks or favourites to my browser, I use Furl, which is a social bookmarking tool. The advantage of Furl is that you can access your bookmarks from anywhere, you can share them with others (hence the "social" descriptor), you can tag them according to one or more topics and they are stored in a searchable database.
Tools like Furl can be used by students to share what they’ve found on a subject or even by a teacher as a starting point for research or commentary. Each item can be ranked (I seldom use the ranking and leave the default at 3) and comments can be added. I use it for myself, my colleagues and my clients. A sample client topic is this one on Language Learning.
My Furl Archive is public and here are some of the most popular itms that I’ve cached:

Congrès CSTD Toronto

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Le 9 novembre je serai conférencier au CSTD Toronto, au sujet de l’apprentissage et communautique en services de santé. Nous serons un groupe très intime, (7 personnes à  date).

Cet étude de cas est à  propos un projet fait par l’équipe Mancomm Performance de Montréal. Nous avons collaboré avec le Centre de santé et services sociaux (CSSS) du Sud-Lanaudière à  la mise en place d’un cours en ligne pour les infirmières portant sur l’approche McGill, ainsi que  la création de communautés de praticiens pour les travailleurs sociaux et les professionnels en santé mentale.

Depuis l’analyse de la performance au travail jusqu’à  la livraison sur des plateformes MOODLE et ELGG (logiciels gratuits et libres), l’équipe a travailé étroitement avec le personnel hospitalier au moyen d’ontologies de domaine et la co-construction d’une base de connaissances.

Cette session sera ciblé vers les méthodologies utilisé par l’équipe et les bénéfices des logiciels libres en apprentissage.

CSTD Knowledge Exchange – Toronto

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One week from today I’ll be presenting at the CSTD Knowledge Exchange conference in Toronto. Tuesday’s presentation will be in English and Wednesday’s in French. In case you’re one of the 32 people (25 English, 7 French) who’ve booked my session, here are some of the specifics.
I’ll discuss how we analysed the work needs of nursing staff and developed a job aid linked to an online learning environment (Moodle).
I’ll show the process that we used to develop an online community of practice for mental health and social workers, including various systems that we tested until we settled on elgg.
Screen captures of all of the online environments will be shown but the focus will be more on the processes that we developed and what we have learned so far.
With the small numbers in attendance, there will be plenty of time for questions and discussion, and my intention is to let the audience drive the agenda. I promise that this will not be “death by PowerPoint”, (I’m using OpenOffice anyway) and you will not have suffer bulleted lists being read to you. If you’re planning on attending and have any questions, please feel free to make a comment here or contact me.

Multi-user Blog Review

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James Farmer has a review of multi-user blogs, including Drupal, WordPress Multi-user, elgg, Movable Type, Manila and pLog. So what kind of real-world applications are there for multi-user blogs?
As I’ve mentioned before, we’re using elgg with a healthcare community of practice and one of the tools is a professional journal (blog). These journals are used to keep other community members up to date on training issues and are used to track committee minutes and agendas. Nothing fancy but it’s a practical application within a corporate intranet.
We like elgg so much at Mancomm that we’re going to move away from eGroupware and switch to elgg for document sharing and internal communications.
I can see multi-user blogs as useful applications for distributed communities (e.g. educators within a school system) who want to share their knowledge and need more functions than a free service like Blogger offers. With multi-user blogs you only need one administrator and the community uses a common platform which fosters peer-to-peer support.

Art Across the Marsh

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This coming weekend, October 22nd & 23rd, is the annual Art Across the Marsh studio tour in our area. The vibrant artistic community in the Tantramar region of New Brunswick is one of the features that attracted us to Sackville. If you’re in the area and looking for something that’s fun & educational then take a look at the website which features the artists and has a detailed map. To see all of the artists you’ll need both days. We go out every year, as it happens to coincide with my wife’s birthday and is a great opportunity to find a unique gift.

A Common Future

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If you want to see what one of the new organisational models for work in the 21st Century will look like, then watch (and perhaps participate in) the Innovation Commons wiki. The folks in Vancouver have organised a web space to discuss all of the issues around the creation of a common work place (the actual name is still being discussed) including a business plan and marketing strategy. This is exciting because wiki technology will allow anyone to see how the community grows; both locally and as a network. The whole world can watch this (I will) and learn from it. It means that successes can be replicated and mistakes can be addressed before they spread. The Commons network may become the first truly transparent organisational model.

I’ve been watching and learning from the Queen Street Commons, as I want to create a local Commons here in Sackville. I discussed it over coffee this morning with a local entrepreneur for the first time, and a work Commons seems to be an idea whose time has come.

The idea is a very easy sell. The most difficult part seems to be in finding the initial capital for the space. In a small town like Sackville this is tough, but we have some ideas. I really appreciate the fact that others are paving the way to make it easier for the rest of us. Once the first few are created, then I expect a great explosion of the entire Commons network.