Category: communities of practice

Community vs. Network – P2P Foundation

From the Drafts: something I wrote about community vs network a zillion dog years ago that showed up on the Peer to Peer Foundation wiki. Still works, but there needs to be an update. How would you describe the differences?

Screen shot of the entry on community vs network on the P2PFWiki

“A community is a bounded group of people who care about something together and interact around that issue over time.

A group of people getting together once may have a fantastic interaction and may learn a lot from each other. But unless they reconvene and join together again as an online group online or whatever, they’re not a community. They’re a group of people who had a fantastic experience together.

One of the things about the behavior of community is we give up a little bit of me, on the service of the “we“.

Identity it’s not just “me“, it’s “we“.

And in some communities that’s a lot… in a cult it’s all “we“. But in many of the communities in my life, I am willing to give up some of the things I need for the greater good of the community, because of the value that the community has to me.

A network are bunches of people with overlapping and intersecting interests.

You may be interested in milk chocolate, I’m interested in dark chocolate. I hate white chocolate but you may have a friend who’s interested in white chocolate and more of the network of chocolate. That’s OK, but we don’t have to give up our love of dark chocolate or white chocolate to be in that network. There is a tolerance for much more variability.

If the white chocolate people start blocking, we just go some place else. We don’t need to hang out with the white chocolate people. You can route around it.

Therefore the boundaries are always shifting. You can work around blockages, and it really drives from the idea of the individual. Whether you call self-interest or enlightened self-interest, the reciprocity is not necessarily one-to-one. You give something, you get something back, but it’s not necessarily equal.

You don’t owe me a favor. We owe the network a favor. If you think from an altruistic standpoint.

There’s very different things you can do in that community context versus the network context.

These new technologies, I feel are really strong around network context. And then the fun thing is communities fall out of networks. people discover each other and grow closer and then they form that bond, that continuity over time and become communities.

When the communities explode, they can go back out into the network, and still be connected but without maybe all that “we“. “I’m done with “we”, I need to go back out into the me!“. But there’s still a connection.”

via Community vs. Network – P2P Foundation.

Tenneson Woolf: Credentials as Practice

From the Drafts Archive:

Still a gem from 2009. I have always been reluctant to join in on credentialing and certification schemes. I resist it personally (my baggage, I know), it focus on the individual rather than the field, and, for process work, context is critical and practice is always evolving.

Collage of four pictures showing the making of cement tiles in Mexico. THis emphasizes the value of practice.

I loved how Tenneson Woolf talked about Credentials as Practice. I’ve put a few snips below, but please, go read the original post!

Tenneson Woolf: Credentials as Practice
1. Credential as Practice — An older kind of thought would be credential as certification. As bestowed. Yes, there is value in this…Yet, there is also immense freedom to think of being credentialed by our practice…

2. Work with Friends — Lots of friends. Practice together. Learn together. Feed off of each other to sharpen skills to see at the next level… 

3. Offer Something — A harvest. A story. A poem. A question. An invitation to work together…

4. Learn in Public — Make it transparent. Open… Half-cooked ideas. Learnings. Insights. Learn on behalf of the whole.

5. Have a Presencing Practice — With my friends at The Berkana Institute, I learn that this work is about emergence… 

6. Examine Core Beliefs — Keep this as an active conversation… 

7. Learn Global. Connect Regional. Act Local … Doing the work in front of us.

Still relevant: “Do You Really Need A Community?”

From the dregs of drafts… I don’t think the advice has really changed and the relevance of the question may even be more than in 2008 when Beth Kanter blogged this. The very fabric of communities and the ideal of community is quite frayed since then.

Colored dots of various sizes on a field of light gray

Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media: WeAreMedia Module 5: Nancy White Suggests Asking “Do You Really Need A Community?”
Nancy is making a distinction between “traditional” online communities where there are relationships between people in the community and people connecting together around specific interest area or a Tribe. This module has originally put these together under one definition of “community” with the latter being “loosely-coupled” communities. But thinking we need to re-think this a bit. Off to ponder “Are You in the Tribe?”

Maybe the focus on this module should be more “engagement” strategies – and the ways you can do this. If you have a group of people that you don’t want to necessarily interact with one another, but want them to create content — you’d still need an engagement strategy to encourage participation. It would, definitely, as Nancy suggests, impact where and how you might do this.

What do you think?

Reflective ripples and learning

From the draft posts I’m mining, I reread a fantastic 2008 post by Konrad Glogowski on his blog, Towards Reflective BlogTalk.

Remember blogs? Well, even if folks no longer blog per se, there is still a lot of writing we put out on the interwebs.

I was taken by his description of a reflective process he developed for his 8th grade students and their blogging. As I read it back in 2008, I immediately put his ideas into this stewpot of “5 minute reflective practices” I had had simmering in the back of my brain. I thought what Konrad wrote about could be used in teams and communities of practice, as well as in classrooms. With a few adjustments, it might be a very fine tool. This idea of “ripples” is very powerful.

Konrad wrote:

It’s not enough to know how to grow a blog, to pick a topic and keep contributing to one’s blog. Our students must also be aware of the class communities in which they learn. They have to have opportunities to think and respond to other writers. They need opportunities to engage in and sustain conversations about their own work and the work of their peers. Blogging is not about choosing a topic and writing responses for the rest of the term. It is about meaningful, thoughtful engagement with ideas.

You’ll need to go read the full post for the method. He links to his worksheet here.

All these years later, reflective practices remain useful and at the core of my process repertoire. Currently Keith McCandless and I are working on a draft of a new Liberating Structure (Strategic Knotworking) and we both feel strongly that evaluation should be woven into work from the start, not just at the end. I suggested that this is a form of reflective practice. I turn often these days to the work of the fine folks building the field of Developmental Evaluation (Michael Quinn Patton and many others), and to the work of Etienne and Bev Wenger-Trayner and their Value Creation Framework and subsequent book, Learning to Make a Difference.

Yes, it is about meaningful, thoughtful engagement…

Back in the day when I thought Twitter was amazing…

Twitter bird logo in white against a blue splotch of paint. Photo from Pixabay

The blog post about Twitter from the amazing, generative and poetic Chris Lott is gone, but this snippet from 2017 remained in my draft blog posts. 

Ruminate » Blog Archive » Twitter Community of Practice

A paper presented here today analyzing a mobile social network application (kind like Twitter with groups, but only accessible from mobile devices) using “information ground” theory has me thinking about Twitter and the immensely important community of practice that it, like blogging, has allowed me to participate in I’m very curious if Twitter, an analogous system in multiple ways, will demonstrate the same characteristics regarding directed, non-directed, social revelation, witty banter, etc.

It’s still vague, but I have some ideas. One part would involve content coding… what “kinds” of Twitter posts are there that we can identify just by looking at them. A few off the top of my head (and a single Twit could invoke multiple categories… and some of these categories could likely be broken down further):

* link sharing
* social sharing (the classic twit)
* direct questions
* direct answers
* banter (generalized)
* banter (directed to in-group)

This was back in the day when I was deeply engaged with many people and networks on Twitter. It felt generative. In a discussion with a friend today, she said she never uses it anymore. I said I use it when I want to know about breaking news, particularly at the local level. But I never “read” it anymore. Partly because I’m less into social media consumption, and partly because the combination of polarized issues and siloed conversations seem counter productive.

Do you still use Twitter? How?

Image from Pixabay