Elmine is doing something I should blog a long ago – working on the project about passionate professionals:

I know a lot of people that work with so much enthusiasm and passion that they keep on doing it, no matter what. Their work and life seem to blend together and demarcation between private and work life seems not that relevant to them.

This project is about them, passionate professionals, and finding out why they’re such passionate workers. Using video-interviews I want to portray these interesting people that belong to my tribe.

It was fun and scary to be the first one Elmine interviewed for the project, almost a year ago, but was very rewarding too – having an opportunity to reflect on my work and passions with a good listener in front of me.

Elmine posted part the video with my interview, where I tell why I ended up doing a PhD and share things I’ve learnt in the process. I watched is a couple of days ago, making notes – to find out later those were exactly about the things I talked in the quotes Elmine pulled out for the post:

“Doing a PhD was a way to give myself time and space to explore and to work on something for a long term and have time and hours and also choices that would be mine.”

Not sure this is the best reason to go for a PhD :) It was definitely the source of many troubles, but also provided more opportunities for risk-taking – while struggling with becoming confident as a researcher I also knew I could afford being on the fringes as I didn’t plan a traditional academic career. I’m not so sure about not wanting to be an academic now, btw :)))

“In an organization, how do you manage things that you cannot control? How do you create conditions for people to be passionate about work, because this is what brings business benefit, but this is something we cannot tell them or put in a job description?”

The funny thing that I’m still there: asking questions very similar to those that brought me into doing PhD research. Hopefully, I’m a bit further with the answers :)

“If you would ask me if I would do it again [a PhD], I don’t know, but I am who I am today also because I went through the process.”

“Being an academic there are certain rules of the game and part of doing PhD is learning about those rules and either comply or breaking or stretching them. [...] If you work in an organization or business or whatever environment there are rules of the game and unless you’re very happy with the game and very happy about the rules you still have to find your own path given the circumstances.”

Happy to have the lessons. Now transferring to other contexts.

***

Just to make sure you’ve seen it: Elmine also has a series of shorter videos where people from “our tribe” talk about education of their children. Knowing quite a lot about their professional lives I find it interesting to peak into their more private and may be more important choices. Especially given that at the moment making those choices is a burning issue for me :)

• Life of a PhD
• Defining personal KM
• Personal vs. business dimensions of employee blogging: other bloggers

Well, it’s a bunch of unanswered questions at this moment, but I guess if I start writing about it I may find answers a bit faster. The bottom line is: in a year Alexander is supposed to go to school and I am not sure that it’s a good idea. Not because schools are necessarily bad, but because I tend to question things that are taken for granted and to distrust external authorities, especially when they try to tell me how things should be.

We take so much for granted about the way the school system operates, and there is so much fear connected to success and failure in school that I believe strongly that we are creating a culture that blindly accepts some cultural story about what works and what doesn’t. The bottom line, in my own experience, is that every child has their own learning needs, and every parent can help meet those needs by keeping a few basic questions at the top of mind. Think about the school system, and what it teaches. Read John Taylor Gatto, John Holt, David Albert and others and think about the kind of learning environment that will best serve your kids. [Chris Corrigan]

This is what I’ve been doing – reading and thinking (and asking people I talk to f2f all half-formed and difficult questions that come as a result :)

Update: most of the details about my questions and priorities at the moment are in the comments below – elicited in a conversation with others.

• Officially I should be back to work
• Once more on languages…
• Soul searching

While I came with the communication egg model to talk about things missing in distributed teams I feel that it could be useful in more contexts. In particularly to talk about the differences between different types of social constructions in the knowledge management context.

[At this point it makes sense to go and read Shrunken communication in distributed teams (the egg of communication :)]

One of the things I came up when playing with different ideas was to position teams, communities and networks in respect to the most prevalent forms of communication in each case (in all cases the other forms of communication are there as well, but are not at the core of it).

Team communication is heavily shaped by the shared goals and agreed communication formats/processes. It’s very much about getting things done together and strong ties that needed for it.

Communication in communities is a bit further from actual work, but still has lots of connection with it (e.g. Q&A mode, where one uses an opportunity of being together with other experts to ask for solutions for a problem). It’s usually a mix of stronger and weaker ties that help to open up and share local practices. There is enough commonality and trust to hold people together and enough diversity to support learning.

Network communication is more opportunity-based and informal. There is not much in terms of shared goals and recurrent conversations, the ties are weak or latent. However, there is enough connectivity and opportunities to communicate that result in cross-fertilisation and emergent ideas and practices.

I guess the things on the diagonal could be also about the types of communication that is supported by specific managerial practices (performance – knowledge management/professional development – informal learning/innovation) or social tools (groupware – community tools – social media).

You can also use this framework to think on what is needed in terms of moving between different types of social constructions: e.g. moving from network to community by picking shared interests and adding a bit of structure (rhyhm, roles) or community-born projects, where shared goals and even more structures (e.g. deadlines :) appear to make sure that things get done. In the opposite direction you might think of “usual” KM practice of spotting overlaps between teams and establishing semi-structured community spaces and processes to make sure that practices are shared across and going to networking events or sharing one’s traces online to create opportunities for informal interaction that brings new contacts and new ideas.

***

Does it make any sense? I’m actually more happy with the picture than we the text around it, but anyway all of this stuff is thinking in progress, so hopefully will eventually evolve into something more understandable.

• WBC04: selected
• Joined Ryze
• Books on-line

I never know when it’s time to tell personal news online and how far it actually makes sense to tell them explicitly instead of letting people to figure it out by themselves by picking up signals here and there… Anyway, in case you haven’t heard yet: another kid is on the way – I will be on maternity leave from the beginning of May.

The fun of anticipating and preparing for a new arrival comes together with challenges of figuring out how to combine it with my professional life, especially given that I just started figuring out what and how I actually want to do after my post-PhD dip.

And it’s more difficult when the first time – now I knowing what being a parent actually means, how much (or little ;) you can actually do work-wise when you free time is not as stretchable as it used to be, how precious is the time when they are so little and how fast it flies. I know that getting back to work after the usual three months is tough, especially now, when I don’t have the PhD finishing line in sight, that I’ll have a couple of seasons when going to a conference would be a big challenge, and don’t even get me started on the long-term issues of combining work and motherhood (we have an extremely inflexible Dutch school system on the horizon)…

Well, there are still three months to go and lots of fun things to do work-wise. I’ll eventually figure out how to make the equation work, but at the meantime would appreciate your thoughts and pointers to success stories (especially those about women who managed to have it all :)))

• Crafting one’s workplace to fit personal preferences
• Once more on languages…
• Learning in the rain

With the holidays I somewhat took a break from blogging on our work on the distributed Agile case, but there are still quite a few things there that I wanted to share to hear what do you think. This one is a bit scary since I picked up some ideas from linguistics without having a proper reading of the work behind it, but at times this is the price to pay* for sitting between research and practice.

So, the picture on the right is a simplified version of the work of Herbert H. Clark:

According to Clark, in order for one person to understand another, there must be a “common ground” of knowledge between them. He shows how people infer this “common ground” from their past conversations, their immediate surroundings, and their shared cultural background. [This is from a back of Clark's book "Arenas of language use"]

In my terms: communication is enabled by the common ground between the participants and, in turn, contributes to building more common ground over time. Taking it a bit further, it is useful to distinguish between two components of the common ground:

• information that the participants share (not necessarily explicitly, as it is often assumed that others know about X because of shared cultural, educational or work background) – I talk about shared knowledge and awareness of the bigger picture here
• relationships between the participants – knowledge about each other and trust

Now to the distributed Agile teams. At a starting point there is a big distance between the team members:

• different locations that make it difficult to rely on team-building and ad-hoc interaction that naturally happens in a co-located team;
• time differences that in some cases provide only a small window of opportunity for interactions;
• different cultures, organisations and levels of technical expertise create difficulties of getting a team “on one page” needed for seamless work.

Distance between team members across different locations creates a vicious circle:

• lack of common ground, the need for using technology and addressing time issues make communication challenging
• challenges in communication make it difficult to overcome initial differences between teams, to build relationships and shared understanding of the bigger picture behind work

This picture is not that far from what you can learn by reading about the challenges of distributed Agile and solutions to address them, but hopefully it can help to address the problems in a more systematic way: spending time on establishing shared understanding and relationships in the team (especially in the beginning) and finding ways to shape communication processes and tools that not only allow to get things done, but also contribute to growing awareness and relationships over time.

My personal “hobby horse” is around the last point. From what we have seen, the communication in distributed teams often shrinks to purely functional and, compared to face-to-face settings, there is much less unstructured informal interactions – this works for getting the work done (at some level), but seriously limits the opportunities to build awareness of the bigger picture and relationships. Most of the solutions in respect to building the common ground in distributed Agile teams still rely on making sure that there are opportunities to visit each other, while there is a lot of space for a technology-mediated ways to do so next to the f2f.

* The ideas behind this post are grounded in insights coming from research on computer-mediated communication and distributed teams, but I need more time to read papers and to integrate research ideas in a systematic way. Hope to blog about it soon.

• What a coffee corner provides, how to call it and a research agenda
• Why sharing a team room might be not so good
• Distributed Agile: the black box of co-located team

This is an English draft for the second of two articles I wrote on blogging for Dutch magazine Informatie Professional (the first one – Blogging for knowledge workers: incubating ideas). The Dutch version should appear very soon, but I’m too impatient to wait for it to share the draft :)  I’ll add the reference/link as soon as it’s there.

Update – see: Efimova, L. (2010). Bloggen for kenniswerkers: het nieuwe netwerking. Informatie Professional, February 2010, pp.22-25.

This piece is based on the study of networking practices of KM bloggers. Practically everything from the study (including interview summaries) is covered in my blog and Chapter 5. of my dissertation, but this article provides a condensed version of the insights.

***

When I interviewed early adopters of weblogs for my PhD research many of them mentioned their surprises that blogging can go beyond documenting own thinking or publishing to the world and that it actually helps to build relationships with others. Bloggers talked about “explosion” of their professional networks as a result of blogging and meeting people that they would not be likely to meet otherwise.

These days, people almost count on social effects of blogging, however it is not always obvious how exactly blogging helps to build reputation and relationships and what is required to make it work that way. Below is what I’ve learnt from the study that looks at networking practices of knowledge management bloggers: how weblogs help bloggers to discover each other and to build relationships.

Finding others and being found

Weblogs help to discover interesting others by serving as magnets and filters. Similar to a magnet that can help finding a needle in a haystack, passionate writing attracts people interested in topics you blog about, inviting them to comment and link back. Filtering works similar to personal recommendation: following links in blogs of people you trust you are more likely to discover interesting others than by direct search.

Connections established as a result of blogging often cross geographical,topical and hierarchical boundaries. Since weblogs are rather person-centred than strictly focused on a predefined topic, a blogger often writes about a variety of personally relevant issues, exposing readers to potentially new and unexpected topical areas and other bloggers within those. Also, in the blogging world interesting content often means more than one’s age, gender or place in an organisational hierarchy: for a new reader it is blogger’s thinking that it visible first, not the profile information. This makes blogging especially useful for newcomers and “minorities” in a particular field, giving them an opportunity to be visible next to the established experts. Those who have reputation and visibility prior to blogging might have a headstart in amount of readers, but they will have to prove that that attention is worth it with every post they write.

Public figures and quiet observers

A weblog serves as “living portrait” of its author. It is different from a well-written biography or professional website. Rather, the impressions of who the blogger is are formed by picking up personal details and cues about one’s personality and passions from multiple blogposts and by observing one’s thinking and interactions over time, similar to making an opinion of public figures by the media coverage of their life.

This visibility comes with both benefits and challenges. From one side, it provides others with an opportunity to get to know a blogger personally before deciding if and when to engage further. In the professional world a weblog could be the starting point for inviting its author to speak at a conference, to work on a project or even to apply for a job. And, in  contrast to celebrities, whos life is covered by others, the blogger himself has a great deal of control about the information that appears in his weblog. If a weblog provides a true reflection of its author’s interests, then the contacts that follow from it are likely to provide personally relevant opportunities for further conversations and growth (bloggers tend to expect it and frown at marketing emails that are not personalised based on information in their blogs). Finally, reading weblogs also helps to stay in touch with one’s existing contacts, providing information about their thinking and relevant events without a need to ask them directly.

From another side, such visibility might be a challenge. Since it’s easy to read weblogs without making yourself visible, contact that might follow are often asymmetrical: bloggers have to figure out how to deal with socially awkward situations talking to strangers who know them pretty well. It is also difficult to control what exactly others pick up in a weblog and what do they read between the lines, especially since weblog content might be easily exposed to the audiences that the blogger didn’t have in mind while writing. In addition, a weblog provides a visible trace of one’s actions and mistakes: what is written may stay “out there” forever and be searched, aggregated, transformed and linked back to the author, so it is essential to learn how to make mistakes in public and how to handle them gracefully.

Relationship-building interactions

While writing a weblog helps to be discovered and known, it takes more to turn first contacts into trusted relationships. The connections between bloggers grow through interacting over time, starting from conversations in blog comments and between weblogs.

Participating in weblog conversations is not easy, since the replies appear in many places: in the comments to particular post, in posts by other bloggers that link back or even outside of blogging, for instance when the link is passed along on Twitter. Bloggers stress the importance of monitoring where the comments on their thinking appear to be able to continue the conversation and to let the readers know that their attention is appreciated. Interactions with others, fragmented over time, help to build trust and knowledge of each others. Also, the distributed nature of these conversations provides good opportunities for collective sense-making: ad-hoc conversations that can be picked up a few weeks later, unexpected connections when one’s ideas become visible outside of the usual circle and emergence of patterns based on where the attention of others goes.

With mutual interest initial engagement via weblogs is continued connecting via other tools: email, phone or instant messaging for more focused or more private discussions, wikis and shared documents to collaborate on writing, social networks, photosharing or microblogging tools to share updates in alternative formats. Meeting in person plays an important part as well: bloggers tell stories about making an extra effort to meet other bloggers and about the excitement from being able to continue conversations started via weblogs while sharing food and drinks. Over time the knowledge of each other, trust and a history of interaction becomes a valuable resource, allowing bloggers to tap into their network with questions and problems or collaborate on specific projects.

Is it worth it?

The networking effects of blogging do not appear in a few days: it takes time and effort to produce engaging content, to monitor where comments appear and to continue conversations via weblogs and other tools. Visibility can also turn into an information overload, with more interesting people to connect to than time for meaningful connections. However, initial effort that goes into establishing one’s online presence via a weblog, building relationships and learning the specifics of doing that via blogging often pays back over time. This is when the wealth of posts accumulated in a weblog continues to attract new readers, having a broad network to rely on helps to get work done faster and smarter, while the effort of staying in touch is minimal.

It also helps to think of a weblog as a front garden: while it’s nice to impress passer-bys or strike a conversation with neighbours, it makes much more reason to invest in it if it’s also valuable for oneself – to sit there with a book or to pick up the flowers for a bouquet. Similarly, networking via blogging is more sustainable when it comes as a side effect of creating personally valuable weblog content rather being the main reason for blogging.

• Blogologue about blogologue
• Blog networking study: getting to know others from a distance
• Blog networking study: establishing and maintaining relations via blogging

[This post was in drafts for a while; posted on the actual date of the workshop, so the participants can find it.]

When I was asked to facilitate a discussion on reflective learning and weblogs at the workshop on Informal learning and the use of social software in veterinary medicine I hesitated: while reflective learning is part of my practice, at the moment I’m far from the theories about it or from facilitating reflective learning in educational settings. Well, at the end it worked – we didn’t go that far into the reflective learning itself, but talked about uses of weblogs for learning of students and practitioners.

A few things that might be useful for the participants and may be some other people.

Reflective learning: I googled for stuff to read on it to brush up my knowledge without getting to far into the theory and found this best practice paper useful – Learning journals and logs, reflective diaries

All kinds of things on blogging that I wrote for practitioners:

• What pragmatists might want to know about blogging – things to consider before starting blogging (what weblogs are good for and which challenges blogging brings)
• Blogging for knowledge workers: incubating ideas
• Blogging for knowledge workers: personal networking
• Facilitating adoption of weblogs in knowledge-intensive environments

• Searching for knowledge as constructing personal learning experience
• Links: self-directed learning, meta-learning
• Links

Once in a while I get a comment that would be nice if I can bring more of my extended professional network into the company I work for. I’m happy to do so, but pretty much puzzled on how this might work in practice.

One side is more or less clear – relying on the network to get the work done. I blog, twitter and reach out relevant people from outside with questions that come from my work. Often, as a result, things get done faster or better.

However, I feel that bring often mean share or give others access to my network. This would be easy with a document, a piece of information, but relationships do not work that way. I can only expose my network and facilitate introductions, but at the end those do not do much for the end result. To collaborate, to get help or new projects, you need more than just a name with contact details and a vague idea of an expertise behind. You need the relationship – trust, knowledge of each other and shared history – and all of those are personal and take time and effort to develop.

And, I guess, there is another part of the equation – networking practices in my network are different from what you would traditionally expect. Our professional lives are heavily online and mainly in public, so most of the usual activities around establishing contact (e.g. meetings to introduce different parties) and maintaining a connection (sending Christmas cards and emails to check how things are) are not necessary – links are there as a starting point of an introduction and one’s activity traces are usually available via many streams. When traditionally the most of work of growing a relationship happens while meeting in person, in my network it’s often a continues stream of fragmented microinteractions online with a few face-to-face pockets in between. And when that precious face-to-face time comes you don’t want to spend it updating each other with all the things that are out there in public anyway…

Of course, many of us are caught in between two worlds anyway, dealing with friends, colleagues and clients that (net)work differently. Personally, I’m struggling to live in both at the same time (the comments I get at work should be  the result of it ;), but I guess there are some people who are better in that – would love to hear about your experiences if you are one of them…

For another angle on the issue – Nancy’s thinking on triangulation (that I should blog in more detail about :) – Triangulating for Success: a practitioner’s experience using external networks to leverage learning and outcomes within organizations and institutions.

• Discovering research connections
• How far from activity theory?
• Rethinking PhD ideas: embedding KM into daily routines

While my Dutch is still far from perfect I am happy with any opportunity to reach local audiences. One of them was writing two articles on blogging for Dutch magazine Informatie Professional – on weblog as an instrument to develop ideas and as a networking tool. Next to the hard work of translating insights from my PhD research it involved serious magic of turning work submitted in one language into a publication in another, so big thanks to everyone involved.

The first article appeared in the January 2010 issue of Informatie Professional which is currently available online for free (as far as I know only till the new issue is out) – Bloggen for kenniswerkers: weblog als buitenboordbrein (pp. 18-21). For those of you who don’t read Dutch the English draft of the article is below (and please don’t be surprised with some reuse from what you saw in this blog or in my academic writing :)

[The second article - Blogging for knowledge workers: personal networking]

***

Weblogs are often discussed as a tool that supports bottom-up knowledge management. They might be useful to tap into insights that escape more formal documents, to see faces behind ideas, to have conversations across hierarchical boundaries and to connect with experts found in unexpected parts of an organisation or outside it.

However, having a vision and installing blogging software is not enough: getting blogging to work in an organisation means helping potential bloggers to find out how weblogs might be useful for them personally and how to sustain blogging in a long-term.

Blogging is primarily known as an instrument for personal publishing, reaching a broad and often unknown audience without pushing content on them. While blogging is personal, most of its advantages are the result being part of an ecosystem, where weblogs are connected not only by links, but also by relations between bloggers. Those relations do not appear automatically: it takes time and effort before one can enjoy social effects of blogging. To sustain blogging before those effects appear it is important to find a personally meaningful way to use a weblog.

In a series of two articles I will discuss how blogging might be relevant from an individual perspective, focusing on two tasks that come along with knowledge work: developing ideas and personal networking.

Weblog as an outboard brain

For its author a weblog might be useful as as personal information management tool, a kind of outboard brain (Cory Doctorow, 2002), used to organise information and thinking. What makes weblogs useful in this respect?

• Personal space. While blogging is public and the usual norms of civilised writing apply, it is you who is in control. Unless intended to be used for a very specific purpose (e.g. to communicate to customers about a product) or within a restricted environment one can use a weblog to write on personally interesting issues in a personally meaningful way.
• Microcontent and flexible organisation of it. Writing and reading small fragments is easy to fit between other tasks and then organise in multiple ways. Next to categories and tags there are always opportunities to link relevant weblogs posts or rely on chronological organisation that it there by default. This flexibility allows emergent organisation of weblog content, avoiding premature filing into fixed categories while providing an opportunity to add more structure later.
• Ecosystem, where capturing ideas in a weblog post also results in sharing it with others. While replies are never guaranteed there is always a chance that someone will be interested. Linking by other bloggers serves as a recommendation of your content and also unleashes the power of search engines to bring new readers to your weblog.

Incubating ideas

New ideas need time to develop. At the beginning it is about awareness and capturing, when a new idea first comes to your radar, either being brought by others or articulated as a result of reflecting on your experiences. At this point ideas are often fuzzy and not connected well to the rest of your expertise, so making sense of them is another step. This is when you discover different aspects of an idea, its relations and its meaning to you. Finally, there is a moment when ideas are ripe: they are used to get things done, turning into reports, advice and mental models you use when making decisions or communicating.

Now let us look at how using a weblog as a personal information management tool can help during those phases.

1. Awareness

Being an expert means knowing what’s going on in your field. Reading weblogs on topics you are working on provides an opportunity to get into direct contact with other experts and hear about new ideas before they make it into publications. Information filtered by blogger networks that you belong to is likely to be relevant to you personally.

Start with a couple of weblogs you like (ask others for recommendations or search via blogsearch.google.com), read them for a while and follow interesting links. Over time you will discover bloggers whose personality, content and style resonate with you. If there are not any than you have a good chance to become an authoritative source yourself.

Think of weblog posts as a coffee-table discussions with a colleague who tells about an interesting article: blog content is not necessarily objective or complete, however it is presented in bite-size chunks and accompanied by the personal opinion of someone you know. Since many weblogs are person-centric rather than focused on a particular topic, you are likely to get exposed to the insights from other fields that bloggers you read find interesting, supporting cross-fertilisation that drives innovation.

2. Capturing ideas in a trusted external repository

Before ideas grow and mature they are vulnerable: it is not necessarily clear why a particular topic is worth exploring. It is often difficult to relate it to the work one is doing at the moment and, as a result to find time for it. Compared to writing a document, which has a particular purpose and audience in mind, personal nature of blogging requires less mental restrictions around what is appropriate: you can always imagine writing for yourself. It is also easy to write a couple of paragraphs that do not necessarily connect to anything (yet), so a weblog can capture many seemingly random notes, creating an opportunity to build on them over time.

In addition, as David Allen suggests in Getting Things Done (2005), capturing anything that distracts you in a “trusted system outside your mind” helps to focus on a task at hand and it also creates an opportunity to notice connections and to generate more ideas. In this case a weblog can serve as a parking space for things that do not fit into your current work, but might be useful in the future, such as comments on interesting articles, observations of working practices or paragraphs that do not fit the main argument of a report.

The open-ended nature of a weblog helps to capture emergent insights before they can be expressed systematically. In a way it is similar to brainstorming with post-its or to a spatial arrangement of papers on one’s desk: at early stages of developing ideas we can more easily say that something is relevant than to explain how exactly it connects to the rest.

3. Sense-making

A weblog helps to develop ideas further in multiple ways. First, the writing process itself is thinking: in many cases putting ideas in words pushes us to think further and to be more precise. Knowing that they will be shared in public and might be relevant for someone else provides an additional motivation to explain emergent insights.

Organising and retrieving weblog content aids establishing connections between fragments and pattern recognition. Adding tags to mark weblog posts on a topic is similar to categorising data in qualitative research: being able to retrieve fragments related to each other helps to notice similarities and differences and to identify bigger themes behind them.

Finally, weblogs provide an opportunity to tap into collective intelligence: there is always an opportunity that someone has a solution on a problem you articulated or have an alternative opinion on the book you reviewed. Something you wrote could be also picked up by another blogger, who blogs about it linking back to you exposing your ideas to a different audience.

4. Getting things done

Over time ideas captured and organised they provide a fertile ground for reflection and reuse. For example, going through old posts on a particular topic could suggest an idea for a new project or an article; looking at the issues you covered in a particular month could help to remember what to include in a progress report. It is not uncommon to hear bloggers talking about reusing their archives, either to save time by sending a link to old weblog post to answer a question, or by turning them into a report or even a book.

A lot of knowledge work requires writing. Blogging helps with a writer’s block, since any idea could be first drafted informally as a blogpost. Sharing parts of a bigger writing project via the weblog provides opportunities to try out different ways to structure an argument and to make it stronger through the feedback. A weblog could be useful to spread the word that a report is finished and available. While a formal publication takes time and is often controlled by an intermediaries, weblogs provide a direct way to reach potential readers and a possibility for viral recommendation of the work via other blogs.

Visible expertise

Weblogs provide a space for articulating and capturing ideas that might be undocumented or hidden in private collections otherwise, parking them in a trusted external repository shared with others. Writing, organising and comments by others help making sense of emergent insights and then use them to get things done. Used this way weblog provides a visible trace of one’s expertise, turning it into an instrument for personal networking.

• No related posts.

This is something that have been in the blogging pipeline for a while, but thanks to the conversations with John Smith I actually finished it :)

A couple of months ago I went through two different, but somewhat parallel experiences. One is from KM4Dev workshop. During one of the evenings I ended up in a discussion by the core group about the need for a more active – taking charge/leadership – position by the community members. The conversation was stimulating and there were follow-up actions the day after. At the last day I also volunteered to join the core group (which is not very logical for someone new to the community, but I felt like helping out and others were open to see how that would work). Since then I’ve been following the discussions in the core group, realising how difficult it is to figure out how I could add value without being at the community core.

Another experience comes from participating in CPsquare foundations workshop, where modelling of a community life is part of the learning approach. The flow of participation required picking up various leadership roles; I was happy to do so, but in the process had a few hiccups that turned into thinking of how this process could be facilitated.

***
I always thought of the leadership in a community of practice as part of the core. As a newcomer you move to the center through legitimate peripheral participation, starting from learning about the community practices by observing, than participating a little, than more and more… The closer you move to the core the more leadership tasks (e.g. welcoming newcomers or organising events) you pick up.

Now I see that view as a problematic, since leadership practices of a community ≠ community practices. Lots of leadership activities are invisible in the daily life of the community (that’s the art of facilitation, too :), so ‘normal’ members, especially newcomers may not know what does it take to make sure that technical issues are resolved, discussions are active and go smoothly, events organised and attended… Also, an ability to help with leadership tasks often requires crossing a boundary: getting admin rights with the tools or joining facilitator meetings and mailing lists. In that respect moving from the core to the periphery in respect to the leadership in the community requires more than being an experienced member.

Of course, it’s not a totally independent process – any meaningful engagement in the leadership tasks requires some understanding of the community practices (that’s why I find contributing to KM4Dev core group so challenging ;). However, you also do not need to move all the way to the core to start contributing (that’s why process facilitators still find a place in communities of practice). The problem is that usually leadership trajectories have to go through the core, because it’s the only way to cross the boundary that gives access to invisible leadership practices. Which not only takes time, but also keeps the workload of existing leaders high, while some newcomers might be happy to help but do not know how.

Now, what could be done to facilitate accelerated leadership trajectories? Make leadership practices in the community more visible, find how to deal with necessary boundaries and facilitate learning.

Some ideas of how it might look in practice:

• Make the need for new leadership visible for everyone. Facilitation in a community is hard and often voluntary work, but lots of it is invisible, so potential new leaders may not realise that existing leaders would very much appreciate help.
• Think of possible leadership trajectories in relation to the specifics of your community and make those visible as well.
• Open up leadership-related discussions when technically possible and politically sensible: invite people to meetings, give access to archives of mailing lists, share summaries of discussions with the community as a whole (most of it is actually done at KM4Dev community, so I’m not very creative here :)
• Ask leaders to articulate their own practices – what does it take and give back, how to do things, what tools to use when, etc.
• Make sure that leadership and participation practices are visible next to each other if there are any written guidelines (e.g. online events: how to participate and how to organise)
• Facilitate leadership-related legitimate peripheral participation by having a pool of small leadership-related tasks that community members can pick up without getting into a bigger commitment

So, what do you think? I’m realising that there should be something on this in the Digital habitats book, but I don’t have it with me…

• Can blogging replace communities of practice?
• Note to myself: think in terms of innovation acceptance stages for every new project
• Leadership