Full Circle Associates

I'm one of the persistent core of folks who hang out on CPSquare, a community of practice on communities of practice. Yeah, I love meta. What can I say? But it isn't all meta. Sometimes it is beautifully "down to action." An example is January's online event on Web 2.0 and Communities of Practice.

CPsquare is holding an online mini-conference in January 2005 to focus on 5-6 major technologies (or tool groups) that reflect the qualities of what is being termed "Web 2.0," probably staying on each one for 2-3 days in an online discussion that's introduced by a telephone conference.

For each tool we'll consider how it's actually used in a community of practice (or speculate how it could be used). We're inviting non-members to join us in our discussions. The conference fee is set so as to give people a glimpse of CPsquare and encourage them to join. CPsquare events combine online discussion and telephone conferences. Register for the Web 2.0 conferencenow!

A range of new tools, architecture, and applications loosely aggregated under the label "Web 2.0" have the potential to change how we use the Web and offer specific opoportunities of rcommunities of practice. For each tool, we intend to ask a set of questions such as:

• What actual tools are included? What are good examples of the tool?
  
• How would the tool help an existing communities? Is it useful for launching a community? Do we see a substitution, an incremental add-on or fundamental shift?
• What potential might the tool have to create new social forms, aggregations, or interactions?
  
• Are there significant tool combinations or interactions that increase the
  tool's use to communities?
  
• Does the tool require technology stewardship to leverage it? How? Why?
• Does the tool have a differential role or effect in open or public communities compared to internal or closed or private ones? How? Why?
  
• How easy or difficult is the tool to connect or interoperate with other tools?
• How does the tool observe common notions such as "community boundary" -- or not?
• How would a community leader or leadership group use the tool to keep the community together or stimulate a community or whatever?

When?
We will launch the conference conference to discuss goals and processes on Tuesday
January 3rd at 20:00 GMT (noon on the west coast of the US, 8 PM in London, 7AM Wednesday in Sydney). Teleconferences will be scheduled at the same time of day on the following days during the course of January. All teleconferences are recorded and an MP3 file is posted for those who miss the call.

The non member fee is $50USD. The tools that are being considered are here, along with the people who've stepped forward to lead the discussions so far. Note that the schedule will change and items may be dropped or added, depending on people's energy.

Join us!