Dissident World

The IDeA have published a report on the Community of Practice ‘Facilitator’s Workshop’ I organised for them on 27th April. The purpose of the workshop was to bring together the various facilitators of the on-line communities supported on the IDeA CoP platform, to learn from their experiences in facilitating communities of practice across local government, and in response to issues raised by the facilitators through their own dedicated CoP, namely:

• how can I keep momentum going?
• who can I turn to for support?
• will my opinions be seen as ‘novice’ compared to others in the community?

Community adviser and activist Ed Mitchell spoke on ‘Nurturing
communities from networks: the gritty bits’. There was also a session
from Hilary Messeter from the National College for School Leadership
(NCSL).

As with many of these type of events, the coming together and sharing of knowledge can be a therapeutic  process, i.e. the realisation that you’re not alone and that someone else has the same concerns and issues as yourself, and better still,  finding someone who has solved the issue you’ve been worrying about.

One particularly encouraging piece of information that emerged from the workshop was that most of the CoP’s across local government have a 10% contribution rate, which is well beyond the ‘1% rule’.

Dave Briggs, who facilitates the Collaboration and Social Media CoP, and the LGNewmedia site summed the day up very well in saying:-

“We’re trying to sell two very ambitious concepts with this [IDeA CoP] platform.
Firstly, we are asking people to tear down silos and start working
together and sharing our knowledge – something that is an anathema to
some elements of local government culture. Secondly, we are asking them
to do so using the web, with blogs, wikis and forums!”

It was apparent to me that there is a close relationship between effective CoPs and effective facilitators - i.e. you can’t have one without the other.

I am grateful to Hilary Messeter from the National College of School Leaders (NCSL) for agreeing to present at a recently Community of Practice workshop I co-hosted. The NCSL have created a Facilitation Toolkit for their community of over 100,000 members. This is primarily focused on communities within the education sector, but the toolkit is a great resource for anyone who is new to the world of on-line facilitation, or indeed for anyone who is currently supporting a community of practice.

I came across this excellent slideshow presentation from Andrew Hinton, which goes some way to explaining what is meant by "Information Architecture". It touches on Social Media, Web 2.0 and communities of practice, and even manages to draw some interesting parallels between social networks and the M-16 and AK-47 assault rifles. I particularly liked the quotation attributed to Groucho Marx - "Time flies like and arrow, but fruit flies like a banana". See how a banana might help you to cultivate your community of practice!   

An excellent commentary and explanation about on-line facilitation from Nancy White over at Full Circle. Very topical for me at the moment as I begin a new contract working as Interim Head of the Information Authority, a new Secretariat sponsored by the DfES and the LSC. One of the key responsibilities for this newly established body (the Information Authority) is to balance need against burden for all information and reporting requirements across the education sector.

My initial thoughts were along the lines of establishing a facilitated stakeholder community, consisting of all interested people, groups and agencies across the further education sector, and through this ‘community’, encourage  transparency on the impact (burden) of requests for new or changed information. Typical changes are in the way that schools and colleges measure success, and change requests can originate from many different sources, from Ministers and government bodies (e.g. Ofsted) to individual schools and colleges.

However, I soon learnt there is a language issue to overcome first. My initial soundings on the concept of using an on-line community approach to evaluate, process and agree changes to data standards and reporting requirements did not go down too well, and the concept of employing on-line facilitator’s for managing change though this embryonic community was akin to talking about encounters of the third kind!

However, I’ve made some headway by making sure that instead of discussing  ‘communities’, I refer instead to ’stakeholder collaboration’, which is going to require ‘change coordinators’ to manage discussion and connections between the stakeholders (thus, for on-line facilitator, read ‘change coordinator).

So lesson learnt here - speak the language that  people  you are working with understand.   The concepts of communities (of interest or of practice) and on-line facilitation are steps into the unknown for some people, and  anything unknown is perceived as a project risk!

More of this later when I’ve either been given the go ahead (or not) to progress with my ’stakeholder collaboration’ and ‘change coordinator’ strategy.

My thanks to Nancy for enabling me to produce the job specification for my ‘change coordinators’ from her posting!

Dave Briggs over at LGNemedia has assembled an excellent montage describing Social Media as a vehicle for collaboration and knowledge sharing. I’m looking forward to meeting Dave today at the IDeA’s Community of Practice Workshop, which I’m co-hosting. We’ve also got Ed Mitchell and Hilary Messeter from the National College of School Leadership who will sharing their considerable knowledge of on-line facilitation with the assembled delegates from the IDeA’s Facilitator’s Community of Practice.

I presented today on the topic of Communities of Practice for the launch of the Progress through Partnership programme, sponsored and supported by the South East Employers (SEEMP). The Progress through Partnership (PtP) is a peer led programme with the objective of creating an environment for knowledge sharing and identifying examples of best practice and innovation for Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs)

The programme includes the launch of a new portal site with a link to the CoP platform.

The idea of using a CoP for this programme of work was well received by most of the audience, and particularly when I explained that these communities were not hierarchical and were not workflow driven. The issue of hierarchy seemed to resonate most with delegates from district authorities, who appear to have a lesser voice in the LSPs than members from unitary authorities.  It will be interesting to see how the inherent flat structure of a CoP will work in this particular programme. A case of ‘watch this space’ I think!

I picked this up courtesy of Beth Kanter’s blog, regarding a recent survey conducted in the education sector on use of Web 2.0 tools. The survey summary analysis is available under a Creative Commons license from David White, JISC funded ‘SPIRE’ project 2007 Survey. I was particularly interested in the data on the ratio between contributors to lurkers for on-line communities, an area I’ve previously commented on (Re the "1% Rule"). The survey reveals a much higher proportion (20%) who regularly contribute to social networking sites (e.g. Flickr, YouTube etc.), which I suspect might be skewed due to the demographic (education sector plus majority of respondents under 21?). It certainly doesn’t reflect my own experience in setting up communities of practice in the public sector (local government) where it’s closer to the 1% rule.

It’s difficult to avoid making generalisations on a survey of this type, but it was also apparent that even within this survey demographic, there was a remarkable lack of knowledge about Web 2.0 social book-marking tools, looking at the high proportion of respondents who said they had never heard of del.icio.us or stumbleupon, and a strange inconsistency between the high proportion of respondents who had never heard of a wiki, and the relatively small proportion who had never heard of wikipedia. I would have thought they could have deduced some connection from the wikipedia name. Ho hum!

Download online_tool_use_surveysummary.pdf

I came across the idea of Action Oriented communities of practice on the Anecdote blog by Shawn  Callahan. It refers to the point in the CoP life cycle when the group really benefits from creating tangible things designed
to improve the members’ practice. This point occurs sometime after the
early days of formation after the members have worked out their domain,
and they know who’s participating, how people get on with one another,
and how members communicate.

The article refers to a five part approach designed to coordinate action within a CoP:

• general discussion
• discussion tables
• a list of possible projects
• small groups (ideally 3 people) working on things together
• database of projects

The community makes progress by hosting discussion tables and
encouraging active and robust conversation that leads people to suggest
things that would be good to do as a community. The list of projects
grows and some are tackled based on the energy and enthusiasm of
members. The process of undertaking these projects in small groups
creates new relationships which in turn creates new conversations and
new ideas for future discussion tables.

I’m inclined to try this approach for the Facilitator’s Community of Practice for the IDeA, which I co-mentor. I was slightly disappointed at the response to a recent forum entry I posted within the CoP, asking what members wanted to get out of the community, i.e. their needs and objectives. There were only three responses from a total membership of fifty. However, this did trigger the suggestion for a meeting of the members, and I’m in the process of putting an agenda together now. I think the action oriented approach the Shawn describes in his blog would be perfect for this occasion, and I will put it to the CoP members for their views. I’m hoping though, I’ll get more then three responses!