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.

• Distributed Agile: communication and common ground
• WBC04: selected
• Using personal knowledge publishing to facilitate sharing across communities

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…

• Blog as a nexus of multimembership and accidental brokering
• HICSS-38: Persistent conversations workshop
• #KM4Dev: Cynefin and dealing with complexity

It’s nice to be a newcomer – you can go around, say that you are new and don’t know much and ask stupid questions. This is what I have been doing at KM4Dev meeting so far.

It’s always nice and strange to discover a network of people who do work and think on issues close to those of my own, but were pretty invisible from my perspective until now. Always a nice reminder that my worldviews are filtered by my own network and my usual practices. Glad I went beyond those.

I don’t have a coherent story about things I’m learning, so just bits:

• lots of development work involves funding that always flows in the same direction, creating all kinds of issues around power and taking responsibility
• what happend when the centralised funding runs out? how do we find a long-term intrinsic motivation and resources or a win-win situation within the network to make it sustainable?
• how centralised and decentralised processes could co-exist? how organisational and network structures can co-exist given that their dynamics and reward structures often contradict?
• newcomers moving from periphery to the center, taking responsibility – how do you facilitate the process when the practices in the center are implicitly negotiated?

• Single community space: why communities are usually tied to one technology?
• Communities and coffee with Nancy White on 5 October
• Accelerated leadership trajectories in communities of practice

Nancy White is one of the people I turn to when looking for an expertise on online communities: she is well grounded in theory, but, most important, she mastered the art and craft of facilitating communities in practice. The good thing is that a lot of it is now documented in a book Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities that Nancy wrote together with Etienne Wenger and John D. Smith. (I am intending to write a proper review of it, but may be you shouldn’t wait for it and just get the book. Or read what Shawn Callahan wrote about it.)

Nancy is traveling around Europe with a stopover in Enschede. If you are around you may want to join use for a coffee and a conversation on communities on Monday, October 5th, 10-11:30 at Novay (if you are coming, please let me know since I’ll have to pick you up at the reception).

I asked Nancy to talk about the book and introduce some of the instruments that could be used when working with communities (e.g. community orientation spidegram), but you can shape the rest, bringing coffee and your questions about communities and technologies to support them.

• Blog networking study: presenting oneself through blogging
• Open issues for research/thinking on communities
• Blog networking study: getting things done

This is a piece from the current version of final chapter of my dissertation where I discuss blogging across various boundaries.  It draws heavily on the conceptual categories from the work of Etienne Wenger on communities of practice (Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity, 1998) and on the discussion with CPsquare members about those.

***

While blogging might provide a window onto practices of the blogger, on a surface weblog is just an artefact: text, links and bits of other media. In this post I reflect on the ways blogging helps to cross boundaries through information exchange and non-personal connections, using the concept of boundary object as a starting point. This concept was introduced by Susan Leigh Star (Star & Griesemer, 1989; Star, 1989), who used it to describe how practices of different social worlds are coordinated:

Boundary objects are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly structured in individual-site use. They may be abstract or concrete. They have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable means of translation. The creation and management of boundary objects is key in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds. (Star & Griesemer, 1989, p. 393)

My original interest in using the concept of boundary objects in respect to blogging comes from the term itself (weblog is an object that works across various boundaries), so my treatment of it deviates from the way it is usually used. I use it to refer to an object at a boundary of different perspectives that include those of an individual, rather than to an object at an intersection between social worlds (Star & Griesemer, 1989) or communities of practice (Wenger, 1998). In addition, boundary objects are defined through their use for coordinating different perspectives (for example, this point is emphasised by Wenger, 1998, pp. 107-108), while in the case of blogging coordination between perspectives is often an accidental side-effect, rather than intentional.

Those differences might warrant the need to introduce an alternative terminology, however I leave it for further work and focus on parallels between boundary objects and weblogs: artefacts-based connections between different perspectives that do not require personal engagement and characteristics that enable those connections.

Contrasting the role of boundary objects in crossing boundaries between communities of practice with brokering, Wenger emphasises that artefact-based connections “can transcend the spatiotemporal limitations inherent in participation” (Wenger, p. 110), since artefacts can travel easier than people, however, uprooted from specific practices, artefacts are also a source of ambiguity and misinterpretation. Studies, presented in my dissertation show that weblogs have a potential to connect different perspectives without requiring personal engagement. For example, readers of my weblog pick up bits of the research relevant for them; KM bloggers use weblogs to establish information relations next to those of more personal nature. The Microsoft case provides a view on how far information can travel via weblogs, as well as an idea of challenges of misinterpretation it can bring.

Based on the different types of boundary objects described by Star (Star & Griesemer, 1989; Star, 1989), Wenger proposes a number of characteristics “enabling artefacts to act as boundary objects” (Wenger, 2001, 107):

1) Modularity: each perspective can attend to one specific portion of the boundary object (e.g., a newspaper is a heterogeneous collection of articles that has something for each reader).

2) Abstraction: all perspectives are served at once by deletion of features that are specific for each perspective (e.g., a map abstracts from the terrain only certain features, such as distance and elevation).

3) Accommodation: the boundary object lends itself to various activities (e.g., the office building can accommodate the various practices of its tenants, its caretakers, its owners, and so forth).

4) Standardization: the information contained in a boundary object is in a prespecified form so that each constituency knows how to deal with it locally (for example, a questionnaire that specified how to provide some information by answering certain questions).

Those characteristics are useful to view what enables weblogs to serve as connectors across various perspectives.

Modularity and standardisation are inherent to weblogs: blogging is about bits of microcontent (weblog posts), connected within and across weblogs by standardised structure and protocols. When finding a new weblog, those familiar with the medium, know how to deal with it (e.g. distinguish specific posts and their metadata, browse through the archives or subscribe to the updates). Specific weblog posts, accompanied by permalinks, can be accessed without the rest of the weblog. This allows information presented in a weblog to travel far outside of the original contexts where it was created.

The potential of a weblog to accommodate various activities is not immediately obvious: on a surface it is an instrument for low-threshold publishing that allows reaching broad audiences without pushing information to them. However, the results of the studies presented in my dissertation suggest that it may also support conversations with self and interactions with specific others (more on publishing vs. interaction, conversations with self and conversations with others).

A combination of those three modes supports accommodation for various practices of different constituencies. An individual blogger might use weblog for a conversation with self – articulating thoughts and feelings, organising own digital bits or reflecting on the traces left over time in retrospect. Publishing makes one’s weblog traces exposed, so others can learn from them without necessarily engaging directly with the blogger. On the other hand, weblogs could be also used for interaction and engaging in-depth, allowing to build relations and trust and to develop ideas in dialogue with one’s contacts.

Finally, since multiple perspectives are served at once, weblogs also exhibit a degree of abstraction, for example, when specific details of one’s work or personal situation is omitted to make possible sharing the essence in public and knowing that the author himself or those “who know” can read between the lines to reconstruct missing details. Abstraction also makes information presented in a weblog accessible and relevant to broader and varied audiences, while also increasing a chance for misinterpretation.

In sum, while not necessarily fully fitting in a definition of a boundary objects, weblogs exhibit characteristics that make them effective in establishing artefact-based connections across boundaries of different social world.

• Studying weblogs at Microsoft: ethnography?
• HICSS-38: Persistent conversations workshop
• Papers from AAAI 2006 Symposia on Computational Approaches to Analyzing Weblogs

This is a piece from the current version of final chapter of my dissertation where I discuss blogging across various boundaries.  It draws heavily on the conceptual categories from the work of Etienne Wenger on communities of practice (Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity, 1998) and on the discussion with CPsquare members about those.

***

While to an extend weblogs do represent bloggers behind them and are often perceived as their online identities, studies presented in my dissertation also indicate that blogging involves many challenges of dealing with different audiences that a weblog serves (the results of blog networking study provide examples of both). Blogging in a context of knowledge work requires balancing interests of self and others, peers and customers, close friends and occasional lurkers, or those of people coming from different disciplinary backgrounds. From this perspective I find useful the discussion of identity in relation to participation in different communities of practice by Etienne Wenger (1998, p.159):

Our various forms of participation delineate pieces of a puzzle we put together rather than sharp boundaries between disconnected parts of ourselves. An identity is thus more than just a single trajectory; instead, it should be viewed as a nexus of multimemberhsip. As such a nexus, identity is not a unity but neither is it simply fragmented.

• On the one hand, we engage in different practices in each of the communities of practice to which we belong. We often behave rather differently in each of them, construct different aspects of ourselves, and gain different perspectives.
• On the other hand, considering a person as having multiple identities would miss all the subtle ways in which our various forms of participation, no matter how distinct, can interact, influence each other, and require coordination.

The notion of nexus adds multiplicity to the notion of trajectory. A nexus does not merge the specific trajectories we form in out various communities of practice into one; but neither does it decompose our identity into distinct trajectories in each community. In a nexus, multiple trajectories become part of each other, whether they clash or reinforce each other. They are, at the same time, one and multiple.

When one belongs to different social worlds, being a one person requires what Wenger discusses as reconciliation, the process of constructing an identity that can integrate “different meanings and forms of participation into one nexus” (p.160).

Although usually participation in different social worlds is somewhat separated in time and space (e.g. being a colleague at work and a parent at home, while still maintaining a single identity of a working parent), blogging brings it into a single space and sometimes even into a single moment, when a blogpost is written to capture one’s experiences between those worlds (for example). In this case different forms of participation collapse creating a living resolution of a boundary. In addition, the work of reconciliation, usually very personal and invisible (p.161), leaves publicly visible traces when bloggers use their weblogs in different contexts.

Wenger discusses participative connection across community boundaries as brokering, which is defined as “use of multimembership to transfer some elements of one practice into another” (p.109):

The job of brokering is complex. It involves processes of translation, coordination, and alignment between perspectives. It requires enough legitimacy to influence the development of a practice, mobilize attention, and address conflicting interests. It also requires the ability to link practices by facilitating transactions between them, and to cause learning by introducing into a practice elements of another. Toward this end brokering is provides a participative connection – not because reification is not involved, but because what brokers press into service to connect practices is their experience of multimembership and the possibilities for negotiation inherent in practice.

While brokering is not necessarily an intentional activity of a blogger, the co-existence and reconciliation of different perspectives in a singe weblog might results in accidental brokering. In this case elements of practices are transferred across boundaries as bloggers address conflicting interests and translate between different perspectives through their writing – not because they planned to do so but since this is what being able to write in a single weblog requires – providing their readers with an opportunity to “visit” practices different from their own.

In this case weblog provides a window onto practice, supporting learning trough legitimate peripheral participation as it allows “to look through it onto as much actual practice as it can reveal, to see to increasingly greater depths, and to collaborate in exploration” (Brown&Duguid, 1992, for more see Legitimised theft: distributed apprenticeship in weblog networks). Access to practices of others in this way requires time and effort of picking up contextual cues “between the lines” and establishing relations needed for joint exploration. However, weblogs also provide an alternative way to peek into other worlds that does not necessarily requires the effort of engaging in person, but rather allows connecting through artefacts.

• Learning: teams vs. communities
• Being researched (2)
• BROG: blog research, visualisations & sushi

For quite a while I’ve been on a conference abstinence track – not submitting papers and limiting attendance in order not to get distracted from the PhD writing.

That’s said, I’m extremely happy writing a paper and going to Internet Research 9.0: Rethinking Communities, Rethinking Place in Copenhagen. It was intense (especially given that I didn’t finish a PhD chapter before leaving) and insightful – it feels that I had all the conversations put on hold over last year in four days… And, the best thing of that came out of it is – somehow having all those conversations really helped me to feel that “I’m there” PhD-wise. Of course, there is still lots of writing to be done, but that feels more like working out all the loose ends and making threads that go through different pieces more visible and more strong. The conference was also good to start thinking about the post-PhD life – reflecting on what topics and people I was drawn to helps to get a feeling of where I’ll be heading next.

I hope to be able to write on some of the themes in more detail, so just the highlights to remember what to write about (I may also come back and edit this post with more ideas and links):

• a distinction between friendship-based and interest-based participation and learning in a keynote by Mimi Ito (notes by Axel Bruns), loosely corresponding to maintaining existing connections and creating new ones
• thinking about online places – their differences from physical places and co-presence as a way of constructing them – and ways of studying (in) them
  • communities, online places and participation; multiple places + multi-membership
  • experienced as an individual and implications for research and practice
• learning: community-based, (duad) relation-based, artefact-based?
• different ways to look at privacy: episodes, aggregations over time, patterns, lifestreaming triangulations
• blogs
  • blogs as transitional objects (find the paper!)
  • exploring identity and constructing identity in one space; changes over time
  • crafts online and research on mommy-blogging (loved to see research done on things I am exposed to via non-work blog reading)
• researching fast changing fields – audiences and expectations (later:
  Research results as yesterday’s news, audiences and expectations)

Twitter notes from two ‘communities’ session on the last day are here.

• On publishing autoethnography
• Knowledge workers redefined: responsibility and creating value by acting on knowledge
• How to advise EU and do research in other countries

Had a pleasure to talk with Nancy on her work on technologies for communities. Some things are still hanging out in my head, so I guess I just write them here to move on.

Open issues for research/thinking on communities (communities of practice; KM perspective).

Definitions. Ton cites Marc Smith:

… let’s shelve the word ‘community’ and use and study the term collective action instead. There are over 150 definitions of community by social scientists. If we (the social scientists) are not able to decide what it is, maybe everybody else should not be using the word either…

I agree with both that there are no good definitions and I like ‘collective action’ as a term, but I think it doesn’t work if you want to talk about specifics. It could include anything between a loosely coupled network, a community with shared language and practice or a project group with tight deliverables and deadlines. The boundaries between those are fluid, but they (at least in the extremes) are different in many respects (e.g. relational density, levels of trust, shared understanding, goal-orientedness, etc.)

Bottom-up evolution vs. top-down control in supporting communities. See the discussion at Dave Snowden’s blog.

Personal vs. social in community tools. Most of the community tools are group-focused (although Nancy is right, it’s getting more and more blurred). However, many of us are members of multiple communities and have to deal with different group tool configurations for all of them. Technology-wise I’d love to see more work on something like personal learnining environments (slides with more) for networking and collaboration: a toolset that would allow me to participate in different social spaces without learning yet another interface.

Aggregation of digital traces and social effects of those. Digital traces we leave eventually get aggregated and fed back to the social spaces we participate in or to some members of those (think of a community moderator who has access to stats on your activity in a community). They change knowledge we have about each other and eventually change the dynamics of our relationships and interactions (think of gaming the ratings or effects of metrics to measure community things in a corporate context). This is going to be bigger and scarier (at least for those people like me :), so we need to know more about it.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/22.html#a1857; comments are here.

• ‘Invisible work’ issue of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work
• Knowledge workers redefined: responsibility and creating value by acting on knowledge
• 5 stages in e-moderating and more on collaboration tools for communities

There is part of my work that I hasn’t been writing much about over last two years. Not because it’s so confidential, but because most of the complexities that I had to face and to learn from are still too complex for a blog post. I am about to disengage from the project to focus on my PhD; I hope I’ll be able to reflect on the things properly one day, but I also need a placeholder for some of the lessons learnt (or, to be more precise for some things where I’ve learnt a lot without having an answer :)

• how your relations with specific people in a project implicitly define the commitments you make and how painful it could be if those unspoken ‘personal constellations’ are changed
• how important is time for developing a shared language, how much you should fight for an opportunity to have it and that the best way to do so is still doing things together and not talking about doing them
• how hard is facilitation of technology adoption, especially if you are already in a technology-mediated settings
• how to make sure things are on track without having the responsibility or means to ‘manage’ (and without doing them yourself ;)
• how to communicate online – hmm, more precisely: how to get ‘optional’ feedback online, how to make decisions asynchronously, how to orchestrate selection of media to fit everyone even if there is nothing there that fits everyone, how not to spam everyone, but still have everyone updated
• how not to be involved, even if it’s good for the project
• how to tame passion
• how to introduce things (slowly :)
• how to balance between decision-making and training
• how to make decisions about technology design with subject-matter experts who don’t know much about technology
• how to write difficult things in email without ruining the relation behind
• how shared working practices could grow in a heavily distributed project
• how to go back and forth between languages; how it is much more than the languages themselves and the need to switch, but the whole cultures and mindsets behind
• how to plan and manage things you can’t plan and manage (community life and support :)
• how to balance paid long-term members and recently joined volunteers in the same team

One day (when I finish my PhD and get back to doing things instead of doing research ;) I will be much better facilitator because of all the experiences above :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/10/11.html#a1843; comments are here.

• Readings on under-management
• KMSS03: Knowledge networks and communities
• Leadership as releasing the energy of others

An interesting follow-up to my earlier comment on Martin’s framework of collaboration tools for communities of practice: Wilfred Rubens on Stages of development of a CoP, levels of trust and ICT tools.

Wilfred does a really good job expanding on the discussion about community technologies and positioning Martin’s trust stages next to the 5 stages in e-moderating by Gilly Salmon (which is new to me).

Salmon’s model is worth checking anyway: it describes the specifics of e-moderation and technical support for 5 stages of community participation (access and motivation, online socialisation, information exchange, knowledge construction and development).

Connected: Technology for Communities set on Flickr (Nancy, I can’t dig out the post in your weblog from where it comes).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/03/28.html#a1747; comments are here.

• Take-aways from UK trip
• Talking about RSS in a company
• Some thoughts on #KM4Dev