Communication tech as second rate

Today the lady who milks our cows every morning stopped by just to tell us something about a cow. It wasn´t a social visit while she knew we were working. She was on her way home from the café, so it was a small detour, but our driveway is quite long and bumpy: why didn´t she just phone? 

She has a telemovel and uses it frequently. But, I figure, phoning remains a second rate substitute. If she has the opportunity to do the real thing, which is pass by and talk face to face, she will always prefer it. 

Pro and con of online life

Note these two opposite views:

Cindy commented on my blogpost on niche-finding about the how online life can isolate and create social problems:

"You see, the problems with internet is, it is a silent and closed world. I can type my life away and talking to all these other people online, yet, anyone around me in the physical world would not know anything about it UNLESS I invite them into my virtual world!! And that is creating more and more social problems.

In the physical world, I might do something that people around me dislike, but at least they know what I am doing. For the same tokens, I might not be interested in something that others are doing, but at least I know what are happening around me. In the cyberworld, we don’t. We lock ourselves in our silent world.

I am actually trying to get out of this virtual world. I am limiting myself on how much time I want to spend online."

While Beverly wrote in her blog quite the opposite: how f2f and online contact is mutually enriching, but the online contact is somehow less one-dimensional:

"It reinforced for me that way that knowing someone online changes your relationship with them when you meet them f2f and the way that changes your relationship with them online… The two modes make for a different type of understanding and reading of a person than you get if you know someone only in one mode.

In fact, knowing someone only f2f seems so one-dimensional that you wonder why people do it! Only communicating with someone same-time same-place is like always talking to them through a glass door."

I can understand both very well. In fact so well that I really don´t know who to agree with. But I am discovering…

Network power

Today was the womens group third meeting. 25 women had come to a pick-nick at practically the end of the world near the spanish border. We visited a beautiful farm of aromatic herbs. Herbs in this area contain essential oils of exceptional quality because of the clean air, dry climate and high light intensity. The owner has dedicatedly been working here for 15 years to select and grow herbs, distill the oils and craft medical and cosmetic products of 100% natural origin (organic, eco-, bio- and so on). She shared with us her troubles of working-on-a-good-idea but not finding fertile earth for it to grow and blossom.
Although herbs/aromatic plants seem a wonderful idea for this marginalized area, the road of is full of obstacles. It had always been planned as a pilot for multiplication by local farmers, but current price-levels are too low. At the same time some clients pay gold for creams and lotions that are half as good…. There seems to be a job for a creative marketing and sales person here, but finding the right partners has not been easy so far.

Our discussion then went to the development of the Alentejo, where we all live. It is depopulating and socially marginalizing. It is, at the same time, showered in subsidies and (therefor) large-scale agriculture is often lucrative. How to revive the villages? How to strengthen the ties between economical and social wellbeing? An anecdote of a PhD researcher illustrates the priorities of the remaining, ageing population: when asked what they wanted for the development of their area they said “a nice mortuary”.

I think the herb farm is not the only one who cannot find the right partners. There is a clue in linking, weaving, networking people and ideas together. The womenns network itself is becoming a stronger network with every meeting. I find that meetings f2f are very important as email is still not deemed ´real communication´. A culture of companionship is evolving. Each meeting generates a lot of enthusiasm and energy.

Real communication does take place though, on email. The email-group has had a few scoops, where the community news was out on email before it travelled elsewhere. Last week a lady announced on the group that 2 adoptive children had been included in their family. Now that´s nice news!

When does niche finding become group-think?

Thanks to blogging you can now find those very few other people around the globe who share your interest, and chat/think/share with them on a daily basis. In the mean time as an effect, your dealings and encounters with less likeminded people are reduced. Now what does this mean? Is our communication getting richer or poorer? Deeper, but narrower? Now what are the risks of groupthink occurring? Is it really so cross-cultural as it seems? Recently I read up on intercultural communication and was interested to see a research where it was found that class barriers are often more important than cultural barriers: a higher class Londoner has more in common with a higher class Indian than with a lower class Londoner. Bloggers all over the world have more in common with other bloggers than with their neighbours. 

When living in Egypt we would take camping trips into the desert. For safety reasons it was best to go with at least three cars. So every weekend we were camping out in a deserted desert with people with whom we did not necessarily have a lot in common except for having the urge (and the 4WD) to get out of Cairo. We got to know people who we would otherwise have ignored, and it turned out to be very worthwhile.

Will web 2.0 thus open our horizons or close them?

Including-excluding

So a lot of it all centers around community making. For a community to form, attracting and retaining members is key. So careful logging of why we become member of a certain community, when we feel that we ´belong´, when it is that a feeling of community starts, can give us some clues about community making. Am I part of my local community?

Yes, for I live and work here, barter with the neighbours, and frequent the local cafes. No, defenitely not completely for it is a rural portugese village with about 200 inhabitants, the average age must be 65 and I think we have the only internet connection in the village.

The neighbour and my son at work in the orchard demonstrate our contrasts.

From being abroad I have learned that to feel connected, speaking the same language is key. (That is why I try so hard to learn the jargon.)

So community making is about having things in common, recognition, trust. Community making requires networking skills (as Bevery quotes Anecdote in her post "a social networking mindset&quot but community is not only about including, also about setting yourself apart from ´the rest´; excluding.

During my early student years, I was an active member of a student association. It felt like home to us: safe, smug, “us” as different from “them”. It went as far as labeling any outsider; we´ld name them ´knorren´. Within the community great heights were achieved in terms of sharing, learning, fun. It was often difficult to explain this to outsiders: “They” don´t understand these things, we would tell each other. I also remember from being a student, meeting almost exclusively other students, effective communication with others (non-students), even parents, became harder.

Jargon or mindset

In an email to someone I said “this is the competition”, which revealed a consultant mindset instead of a knowledge management worker mindset. As a KM worker I would have said: “interesting opportunity to share”
It shows my ambivalence: do I want to be a researcher or a consultant? The answer is: both. I really like the reflective and analysing part of it all, but am convinced the learning on this theme, should be indicated, paced and fed, experienced from practice. So I want to be a practioner.

My real interest remains development. How can CoPs or web 2.0 contribute to solving complex problems, like watershed management or water distribution? To local development? To innovation? To partnering, brokering of contacts between public, private and third sector? To networking beyond communities?

Community making

The hard part of trying to initiate a community of practice seems to be creating a sense of community. Thinking about it, the whole of modern communication seems to be about community making. Communication used to be modeled: sender » medium » receivers. The hard part was the medium- you needed to convince editors to get your articles published, but once you’d passed that hurdle the readers would come more or less automatically with the medium. Now everybody can publish anything, but receivers are no longer to be taken for granted. So modern marketing, teaching, blogging, pod- and vodcasting: if you manage to form a community that is receiving, but also participating, you can roll. It´s community making that defines whether communication takes place.

So there are some exiting features about the new communication:
Role switching
Collaborative work
Niche communities
No longer same time same place

This has had great impact on CoPs, also. What I gathered from the discussion about minimal number of participants on the email group of com-prac: answers ranged from 2 to 30.000, examples provided. The original examples by Wenger about nurses on a ward have been complemented with modern examples of email groups with thousands of members…

But although most of our communication is with people we have things in common with, what is really interesting is establishing communication with ´others´, outside your own community. So if modern communication is about community making, how to reach people beyond your own community?

Jargon note: if you take interactivity seriously you should say not website but webspace

History of learning

Personal learning log: CoPs and web 2.0 technology

It is very hard to speak a foreign language well, but once you can it seems really easy. Web2.0 is not as easy to learn as many adepts seem to asssume. The same goes for on-line communities. I will try to log carefully my own learning, to be able to remember what is hard to learn, what are the changes in mindset required. For the past year, this had to be in retrospect.

This is how my interest for learning, on-line communities and web2.0 developed the past year

It started from surfing the web. Being in a new country, I tried to find starting points for finding a job and other entrances. I used a computer on a daily basis, both for work and privately (for emailing, finding information, reading the news, banking, booking flights, occasionally buying electronic devices or ordering presents from abroad to be delivered in Holland.) I had been a member of various emailing lists for some years. I had read and followed some blogs but stopped again. I had sometimes contributed in open forums but never really liked them as they often seemed to be circleing around the same issues (the FAQ´s), with irrelevant quarreling and quite often reactions in a snappy tone-of-voice from either the ´locals´ or outsiders.

I went looking for log-in spaces. I then discovered yahoo groups. I was interested: it seemed a powerful tool for working together, for learning. However, in the thousands of groups yahoo listed on sports, hobbies, pets or pastimes I couldn´t find what I was looking for, although I wasn´t too sure of what that was.

I joined a yahoo-group of dutch people (it appeared to be all women) who largely lived abroad, and in my second post I asked what they had learned from the group. They answered it had given them tips on travelling, where to buy coffee pads, and when the sales started, but that the group was not about learning. Learning was not their objective, it was mostly for companionship and ´just chit-chat´. Although intrigued by the bonding an sharing (community forming) that occurred, the window into the lives of people, some of whom you´ld never otherwise have known, I soon stopped contributing almost completely, although I continued to read others´ posts. I was not satisfied, I wanted something more related to work, to my real interests. Something more substantial, more objective-oriented and learning oriented. One day I asked the group what they thought of the fact I was posting very little, what they thought of lurkers. Most said they did not approve of them so I left. I still think of the women I met there sometimes.

I started a yahoo-group for my group of friends. I now was a moderator. We had emailed collectively for years, with chat, logistics of get-togethers, and also more serious correspondence, taking turns on updating the rest about our personal lifes. The group meant a small increase in traffic, but it was only temporary. Otherwise the introduction of the group made no real change. IRL contact and for some of us 1-to-1 email remains more important to us.

Somewhere along the way I came across the terms Community of Practice and Knowledge Management. The terms resonated as they had seemed related to me and interesting, but I still could not really figure out how.

I think around the same time I joined csr chicks neth, a dutch 400 women network with monthly IRL meetings who communicate through a yahoo-group. A friend indicated it to me. Similar groups exist in many places under the same name. In Holland it has organically grown from 10 to 400 young women from all sectors with an interest in CSR-corporate social responsibility and sustainable development. The dutch chicks, for 4 years now, have exchanged a steady flow of average 50 emails/month on the issues, and it is a very good source of info and contacts. The emails very much resemble the single source mailing list although they originate from a wide variety of contributors. They can be classified as announcements rather than questions, they are informative, not inviting reactions. No threads are spun. For a list with people of whom many know each other, there is surprisingly little (namely none) off-topic conversation.

I then joined Women on the Web, on their ´list´ as they call it, for women who have started their own company. Also a network which also does IRL meetings, women only. They use their own (majordomo) group. email trafic is very different from the csr chicks group. Long threads, dialogues, instant practical help, opinions, tips, and a lot of off-topic, which in turn becomes a topic.

For my daily practice of being a dairy farmer in portugal I still had not found any peers. RedeNed was my own creation. A network for women with links to agriculture in south Portugal. As I did not have access to any portuguese agricultural people, and to avoid the complexity of multiple languages, I focused on dutch farm women.

I joined VWI to learn more about how networks function. Some of VWIs special interest groups are sub-networks VWI platteland, VWI water. I had the idea to ´copy´ CSR chicks to Portugal: Raparigas Responsaveis, a group I started but which soon went dormant.
I started reading some blogs. Finally, I decided to initiate De Kennisclub. I read some more blogs and because of that met Bev, who during a wonderful afternoon in Setúbal introduced me to some more web2.0 . On her account I switched to Mozilla software, started an aggregator Bloglines, (secretely) started practicing with a wiki and some blogging. I joined Flickr and numerous mailing groups. I made great shifts on the range from perceiving ´the Internet´ as a scary place where you had to be as anonimous as possible, to perceiving it as endless opportunities where you have to profile, identify, expose yourself as much as possible. I never liked watching TV very much but now whenever I joined others watching I felt short of a mouse, of controls. It had become almost uncomfortable to be just watching, at a pace decided by others, like a straight-jacket.

This trip, from discovering yahoo groups to starting a blog, took me over a year. I find that among my friends and aquaintances, most academic thirtiers, I am still an early adopter, how laggard I may seem in bloggosphere.

Now why did I start and, this time, manage to continue this trip into web2.0? Factors that helped:

• Having time available
• Being at cross roads in life; networking to find my way into a new country; being relatively isolated of academical input or likeminded contacts, no peers around
• being between cultures
• Simultaneous with my discoveries, the emergence of Web 2.0 and social networking software: technology became social
• Finding a field (CoPs and KM) of interest.
• Later: Finding a contact f2f

learning log

This log is logging the behaviour of Communities of Practice and my “common sense”-learning. I hope to be learning about CoPs, communities, communication and the implications of web2.0 for the management of common goods like water, natural resources, knowledge.

With this CoP log I want to describe the development of some groups-with-elements-of-CoPs which I initiate or in which I participate. Are they CoPs? How do they come into existence, mature, decline again? What are the conflicts, the hurdles they experience. How is leadership conceived? Do they bring the participants what they need, what they hope to get? Who joins, who drops out? In what ways is the CoP effective, in what not? As I hope to learn answers to these questions along the way, it is also a log of my learning.

I want to log the groups-with-elements-of-CoPs, with two objectives:
-for CoP Doctors to diagnose and cure: because of looking at them in this way I or others may analyse some problems and come forward with solutions, or prevent problems
-for CoP historians to learn: over time, a CoP log will in retrospect give us some idea of the processes CoPs are subject to.

So all CoP doctors and historians: find your test cases here.

Background
Recently I have become intrigued by on-line communities. There are certain parallels with what I did until now, there is a strong feeling of familiarity, of coming home even. But yet there is a lot to learn, still. What exactly, and how… I am not sure.

There´s lots and lots to be found on the theory part of on-line communities, on communities of practise, but this time, and in honour of the CoP spirit, I want to focus on learning from practise. This is a log of my learning.

Why public? I had tried reading blogs before but had concluded that blogs were a `self-indulgant fad´(these words linger in my mind: I´m quoting someone´s words but sorry, have tried but cannot track back where). I thought blogging was similar to TV real life soaps like ´Big Brother´: while it still can be understood why people watch them, it´s quite mindboggling why people want to participate in them. I figuredonly vain or lonely people would want to take all this trouble to share their thoughts, lives.

It was / is only very slowly that I am discovering the power (and re-discovering some of the weaknesses) of blogs. Did I change, did blogging change? Up till now I am not sure in this discovery process if it was me finding out, or the blog world evolving, or a bit of both. (But I am not alone, looking at the enormous increase in blogs.)

I can see the potential of blogs of making tacit knowledge accessible, of a networking tool. I cannot quite fathom it though, I want to understand it better.

So, accepting that learning is a social activity, I decided to expose my learning process, and to share as much as possible of my learning process, and if possible, to tug in contributors, co-learners.

Learning Questions

On communities of practise

• Are these groups CoPs?
• How do CoPs come into existence, mature, decline again?
• What are the conflicts, the hurdles they experience.
• How is leadership conceived?
• Do they bring the participants what they need, what they hope to get?
• Who joins, who drops out?
• In what ways is the CoP effective, in what not?
• How will paid membership impact?
• What are prerequisites for CoPs? Eg can you have a CoP if people do not trust each other, do not speak each other language, or are of very different status?
• Why am I so convinced of the combination IRL-on line, is it justified?
• Can CoPs function in SME/entrepreneurial settings such as agriculture?
• Is technology proficiency very important for starting an effective CoP?
• How does context affect design & function of CoPs?

Beyond CoPs

• How to reach people beyond your own community?
• How can CoPs or web 2.0 contribute to solving complex problems, like watershed management or water distribution? To local development? To innovation? To partnering, brokering of contacts between public, private and third sector? To solving multi-stakeholder problems?
• What is relation to known concepts as Raaks, PTD, institutional development, local development or local innovation? what can be learned mutually?
• (from post 14-04-06) When does niche community formation become group-think?
• In what senses is the Internet/information/knowledge a new common good? Is it worth while to compare research on the traditional commons and these modern commons?

On personal learning

 

• What is the best way for me to learn about these issues. Is learning from practise and common sense a good way?
• How does a blog expose your weaknesses / strengths: is the Internet a safe place?
• is blogging effective for learning?
• is blogging effective for networking?
• Will I succeed to engage others in my learning?
• How to enter the field of CoP adviser? Independent, in a network, or as an employee? What would be my preferred balance between production and research?