Miscellaneous slides from my Advanced Online Communities workshops in Australia, 2009. Note that these represent raw material rather than a sequence of ideas.
23. addressing inherent community tensions Tools Group asynchronous discussion boards teleconference chat instant messaging member directory wiki blog telephony/ VoIP individual profile page e-mail e-mail lists scratch pad RSS “ new” indicators subscription podcast content repository presence indicator buddy list security Q&A systems RSS aggregator newsletter calendar videoconference application sharing whiteboard site index participation statistics search subgroups personalization community public page version control document management UseNet content rating scheduling polling commenting networking tools tagging bookmarking shared filtering geomapping www.TechnologyForCommunities.com Etienne Wenger Nancy White John Smith Individual Interacting Publishing synchronous Group asynchronous
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29. don’t worry – there will be bumps in the road…TALK about them
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33. Tech + Social: Technology has fundamentally changed how we can be together
34. Many: Networks We: Communities Me: the Individual Personal identity, interest & trajectory Bounded membership; group identity, shared interest, human centered Boundaryless; fuzzy, intersecting interests, object centered sociality (Engeström)
35. Many: Networks We: Communities Me: the Individual Self, identity, consciousness, confidence level, risk tolerance, styles, emotion Distinct power/trust dynamics, shared forward movement or strong blocking, stasis, attention to maintenance, language Flows around blocks, less cohesion, distributed power/trust, change
So in the past, I’ve done this exercise in pairs, in World Café and in the 1-2-4 build up. I’d not do 1-2-4 here and Café takes longer, so I suggest pairs or maybe rotating pairs then a debrief.
We didn’t get to the network mapping
In our research of CoPs we noticed 9 general patterns of activities that characterized a community’s orientation. Most had a mix, but some were more prominent in every case. Image: Wenger, White and Smith, 2007
In our research of CoPs we noticed 9 general patterns of activities that characterized a community’s orientation. Most had a mix, but some were more prominent in every case. I’ll walk us through each profile and give some examples. Image: Wenger, White and Smith, 2007
We can use the activity circle as the basis for a spider graph and evaluate the groups we are working with. I’ll give a few examples. We can use this spidergraph to inform both our process and our technology designs in a learning setting.
Things look different in different types of communities. This is a support community.
Sliders – as we think about how we pick, design and deploy technology, what sort of intentionality do we want with respect to these tensions? More importantly, how do we use them as ways to track our community’s health, make adjustments in both technology and practice.
The time/space dimension is represented on the horizontal axis, with primarily asynchronous tools toward the left and primarily synchronous tools toward the right. The donut of the middle band represents the tension between participation and reification by classifying tools along a continuum between interacting in the upper half and publishing in the lower half. The tension between the group and the individual is represented by the center circle and the outer band respectively. The center circle focuses on the collective, with group and site management tools. The outer band focuses on the individual, with tools for managing participation from the perspective of individual members.
Get used to it Control is an ILLUSION
So let's do a little comparing and contrasting of this circular continuum. You can be clear when we talk about the individual, me. We can be clear when we have bounded communities with clear establishment of in/out membership. We can also have communities with fuzzy boundaries, which may even be networks. If there was a subliminal sign flashing across this slide, it would be saying “IDENTITY.” identity shows up differently across this continuumand identity can be linked to purpose and boundaries. http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2005/04/why_some_social.html (Social-material networks)
You can be clear when we talk about the individual, me. We can be clear when we have bounded communities with clear establishment of in/out membership. We can also have communities with fuzzy boundaries, which may even be networks. These different boundaries influence the power dynamics that occur between people. It influences processes of leadership and other roles. It defines levels of trust and privacy – which are not always closely linked as we move to the network level. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/bonnie_bassler_on_how_bacteria_communicate.html
The idea of polarities that show up in group interactions. Tensions that we can learn to creatively leverage, rather than trying to resolve. Because resolution is usually impossible! Nor is it desirable. It is about noticing where a community is and what it needs at that moment along a polarity, and using tools and processes to move them to that desired point at that moment in time. Sliders – as we think about how we pick, design and deploy technology, what sort of intentionality do we want with respect to these tensions? More importantly, how do we use them as ways to track our community or network's health, make adjustments in both technology and practice.
Technology creates “community time” that defies schedules and time zones, and “communal spaces” that do not depend on physical location. One obvious appeal of technology is its variety of solutions for dealing with time and space to achieve continuity and togetherness: to hold a meeting at a distance, to converse across time zones, to make a recording of a teleconference available, to include people who cannot be physically present, to send a request or a file, or to be up-to-date on an interesting project. In a community version of “time shifting” and even “space shifting,” togetherness happens in a variety of formats that enable participation “anytime, anywhere.” Practice issues: Community profiles as patterns of togetherness. How do we learn best. Respect the time of each member. Front or back channel, what problems to bring to the whole group. Networks demand less profiles of togetherness and instead need visibility of nodes for discovery. Social network mapping can be a tool to help nurture nodes. The practice of network weaving can build new social connections. Individual control of the connecting tools or software can give an individual some level of control at their solo level.
Individuals want control over their interaction and perhaps ownership over their publication. Members of a community of practice need to interact with each other as well as produce and share artifacts such as documents, tools, and links to resources. Sharing artifacts without interacting can inhibit the ability to negotiate the meaning of what is being shared. Interacting without producing artifacts can limit the extent and impact of learning. Indeed, the theory of communities of practice views learning together as involving the interplay of two fundamental processes of meaning making: Members engage directly in activities, interactions, conversations, reflections, and other forms of personal participation in the learning of the community; members produce physical and conceptual artifacts—words, tools, concepts, methods, stories, documents, and other forms of reification —that reflect their shared experience and around which they organize their participation. (Literally, reification means “making into an object.”) Meaningful learning in a community requires both processes to be present. Sometimes one may dominate the other. They may not always be complementary to each other. The challenge of this polarity is how successfully communities cycle between the two. Networks provide individuals and communities a place to share out what they produce, access the products of others and in that process, remix, mashup and create newly both individually and collectively, but often outside the boundaries of communities, on edges where innovation can flourish while it might be stifled in a community.
Technology provides so many new ways to interact and publish while supporting the interplay of participation and reification that it can profoundly change the experience of learning together. Technology enables new kinds of interactions, activities, and access to other people. It also provides new ways to produce, share, and organize the results of being together – through documents, media files, and other artifacts. Most important, it affords new ways to combine participation and reification. For instance, by providing a web-based whiteboard for a conversation, we are supporting new forms of co-authorship where we casually mix words, images and sounds with each other . Technology also pushes the boundaries of both interacting and publishing for a community. It makes it easier for the work of a community to be opened up to the larger world. It can allow a community to decide whether to publish artifacts and invite comments publicly or to hold them within the private boundaries of the community.