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.

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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…

• The power of lurking
• Research on lurking
• Open issues for research/thinking on communities

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?

• Community straddlers and innovation: asking right questions about communities of practice
• PhD recovery plan
• Beginners-friendly communities

Ton wrote long and thoughtful post on BlogWalk facilitation, and, while I agree with most of it, there is part that I think is missing.

When we started, BlogWalks were a way to amplify conversations we had online. Most of the participants would know each other from their weblogs, not only personally, but, which is more important for this post, topic-wise.

Now things are different – the people coming are more diverse and less connected then before. Also, some of them are not bloggers, but even for bloggers things changed – how many of you moved from reading a few weblogs in depth to scanning many? So, weblog-mediated familiarity with other participants that we are started with is not there.

It’s not bad (diversity is always a plus), it’s different. And I believe it needs to be reflected in the way BlogWalks are structured and facilitated.

What I missed this time was topical awareness of others – who are the people to talk about topics I’m interested. Days before BlogWalk I went to check links behind each name, but there was a limited picture I could get from it: some people linked to their companies (so how do I know what interests them?), but even for bloggers you can get only that much by browsing a weblog that you see for the first time (before I’d read weblogs of other participants for months prior to the event). We couldn’t make it to the dinner (this is how having a baby restricts your mobility :), but given my experiences from other dinners I doubt that this would give enough of the coverage.

In fact, there was something that gave an overview of topics that people wanted to talk about – post-its on the windows wiki. However, there wasn’t an easy way to figure out who wrote those I was interested in (I still wonder who wrote the one about the ethics of oil-fuelled travelling). Taking my responsibility for my own needs I tried to take the initiative and to propose a round of a group-wide time where people could announce the topics they wanted to discuss, but Ton suggested that it wasn’t necessary and moved on*.

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So, what is my take of facilitating BlogWalk – more structure or less? I’d say as much as needed. If we can create conditions (e.g. as Ton proposes) for awareness of each others interests and taking responsibility prior to the event, as well as structure the space to facilitate conversations, then “no structure” and “no facilitation” is perfect. If not, then there is something else to do.

Specific things that we could do better this time:

• A couple of rounds of a group-wide time (e.g. one in the beginning to announce “I would like to talk about X,Y,Z” and shorter one in the afternoon – to get on the same page before breaking into free-floating discussions again). We could think of alternative ways to create an opportunity for 1-to-all communication moments (e.g. ask people for a keyword intro to put on a wall and scheduling 5 silent minutes to look at it). Also, emphasising a bit more that signing your post-it makes it possible for others to discover you. Actually I believe that creating a space/time for a group-wide communication is something for a facilitator to be responsible, since it’s difficult for a participant to take initiative in that respect (it’s much easier to start one-to-one conversation in the corner then get attention of everyone).
• Name tags. Or printed intro of people with photos. Anything that helps to connect a face to a name during the event.

Even if there are reasons not to create a group-wide time slot, we could do something like printing out the list of participants (+making sure the photos are big enough to recognise people), hanging it somewhere on the wall and asking people to add their initial “I’m interested to talk about X” post-its next to their names. (I could even think about it before the event, but it’s easy to get your expectations formed by previous events, where something like that wasn’t needed :)

Another thing we could do is to facilitate awareness and communication prior to the event (and a follow-up of course). Ton suggest some ideas, but I guess we’ll need a bit of discussions and experimentation to see what really works – getting a diverse group of people on the same page in a technology-mediated way without much facilitation is a nice challenge to work on.

Technorati: blogwalk blogwalkeleven blogwalkamsterdam

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/05/25.html#a1897; comments are here.

• BlogWalk, BlogDay and Les Blogs
• BlogWalk 7: Mechelen, Belgium
• Links on unconferences

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.

• Leadership on the web
• CPsquare open house
• IBM research papers on communities, learning and more

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.

• Author-centred vs. topic-centred blogging
• Communities: activity vs. content access
• Talking about RSS in a company

This time in Moscow was different – next to all other things I was running a kick-off meeting for a project (will tell more later – when marketing stuff is out :) with several European and Russian partners. For many Europeans it was the first experience in Russia – signtseeing, but also learning about the culture and preparing for the joint work.

I wonder if I was annoying with all my questions about their experiences :) I was so curious to know what did they discover, find different, similar, worth attention… Even with open borders Russia is still pretty much unknown for many foreigners: image of Russia is a strange combination of cold war time impressions and stories in the media magnify specific issues, but do not tell much about everyday life. I’m happy that this trip made it a bit different at least for a few people.

What I found interesting (and – in retrospect – it shouldn’t be that surprising) that most learning about culture came through experiencing it – finding a way around the city and, especially, three days of joint work with Russian people (like a discussion on financial issues of the project that illuminated many issues that Russian businesses are facing). I was there with two colleagues, and, in spite of all my attempts to prepare them by telling stories it feels like my stories were nothing compared to the richness of their own experiences even in a limited number of situations.

We didn’t design on purpose for those experiences, but, given my believe that understanding cultures – similarities and differences – is crusial for this project, I really would like to think how to make “learning about culture through experience” element stronger next times.

I also think about this from an ethnographic perspective – I’ve read too much about learning culture through reflecting on moments where you as an outsider do not fit. What is strange and funny is my own role – I was constantly switching between being Russian, being someone living abroad and being someone in between – understanding both sides, trying to mediate for common language, thinking of mediation process… This in-between position shows me a way to redefine my own identity and go beyond my current dichotomy of being a guest in the Netherlands or being a stranger in Russia.

And – in case you are curious – main impressions of our European guests (my biased summary ;)

• passion of Russian people
• beauty and scale of Moscow
• green and beautiful parks
• life that never stops (like bookshopping after midnight – and seeing that there are others :)
• a strange combination of a modern high-standard city (could be any European capital) with third world elements – differences that somehow co-exist next to each other

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/05/28.html#a1579; comments are here.

• Some thoughts on #KM4Dev
• Weblog as a research notebook (1): reading ‘Life online’ and del.icio.us as bookmarking history
• Worldmapper, immigration exam and cultural awareness

I wrote earlier that I didn’t have much time for learning and networking during this summer school. I was wrong.

I didn’t have enough time to do usual networking, so I missed some interesting people, but working together with others to organise this event allowed building deeper connections with some people instead of scratching the surface of “who does what”.

Learning was different as well. I didn’t learn much of the program (which is not surprising as I was involved in organising something during 3 days out of 5), but I’ve learnt a lot about organising a learning event like this one.

So, these are my lessons learnt. They are based on participants’ feedback, organisers’ debriefing and many one-to-one informal talks. Important conditions to take into account if you think about reusing them:

• This is a summer school, not a conference or a training course. We tried to balance some elements of both.
• It was organised mainly for young KM researchers (although we had enough experienced researchers and practitioners), so you can’t rely on participants being active and confident all the time.

Team and process

We worked as a distributed flexible team; most of the program committee members were volunteers and we didn’t have any “formal” leader. Most of us met during last year KM Summer School without knowing we will organise this one. After forming the program committee somewhere in beginning of 2003 we didn’t have any single face-to-face meeting with all of us, but few people met each other on other occasions. We had to rely on e-mail (somehow threaded discussion didn’t work), bi-weekly phone conferences and occasional phone calls. No conference management system, no document-sharing repository, no centralisation…

As some others I’m quite impressed with what we were able to achieve given these settings. But if someone asks me if I would do it this way again, I would say no.

It takes too much energy to achieve results in such a distributed network with no formal commitments (as a volunteer you can always have valuable excuses), no process/communication facilitation and no shared understanding/experiences of organising a learning event like KM Summer School 2003. Too many uncertainties altogether.

So I would work in a distributed network if there is a clear process and responsibilities or if there is shared understanding of how things work. The last one is probably most important: shared values, shared approaches, being on the “same wave” makes sure that you can work on achieving results and not on achieving shared understanding first.

Then there are some practical sides: using conference management system (e.g. free one like ConfMan or ConfMaster), structuring and capturing communication (ideally forum/wiki + file exchange server), a bit more centralisation and face-to-face contact.

Program, sessions, networking

Presentations

• No presentations after lunch
• Be careful with several presentations in a raw; better think of something interactive in between
• Prepare inexperienced presenters (ask them not to read their paper, focus on few most interesting issues, provoke discussion)
• Ideally make parallel sessions with inexperienced presenters (the risk of getting the whole audience bored is too high :)
• Questions

• Make more time for questions
• Do background negotiations with “talking too much” people, so they give more space to others to comment
• May be writing down questions on paper can work to give space for more people to ask questions

Interactive sessions

• Make sure results of small group work are presented
• Do not leave group work for self-organisation, structure the process (and leave more time at the end to continue with self-organised discussion)
• Provide group process facilitators if possible
• Find ways to involve everyone and not only “leaders” talking (e.g. asking everyone to brainstorm on paper first and then discuss results in a group)
• Give reading materials in advance and then don’t rely too much on people reading them

Socialising and networking

• Make sure there is a bar/restaurant in the hotel (“common space” in the evening)
• Make sure there is a group of people initiating “having dinner together”, so people without established network can easily join
• Longer breaks (at least 30 min)
• Write countries on badges
• Support finding each other by interests
• Scaffold active position (this is a separate topic which I hope to address one day)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/09/14.html#a743; comments are here.

• KM Summer School, conference blogging and vacation
• Formal/informal interplay (2)
• Conference blogging