CoP.nl

With some others, we are working on a conference to be held June 2nd, in Wageningen. The title is: “CoP.nl”, and that is what it is: an exploration of what is happening in the domain of communities of practice in the Netherlands. We will have 4 parallel tracks in the morning, where you can stock up on other peoples’ input or share your own experiences. In the afternoon a “knowledge café” will give you a sniff of what happened in other tracks during the morning, but also ample opportunity to explore what other participants are doing with cops. The language will be Dutch…

Met een aantal mensen zijn we een conferentie aan het voorbereiden die 2 juni in Wageningen gehouden wordt. De titel is CoP.nl, en dat is wat het is: een verkenning van wat er in Nederland op verschillende terreinen gebeurt rond “communities of practice”. ’s Morgens hebben we 4 parallelle ’sporen’, waar je je kunt laven aan de input van anderen of zelf je ervaringen kunt inbrengen. ’s Middags is een mengvorm van een “kenniscafé” gepland: om een idee te krijgen van wat de andere 3 groepen hebben gedaan tijdens de ochtend, en om in kleinere groepen te verkennen wat er zoal in Nederland speelt.

Samen met Marc Coenders faciliteer ik het volgende spoor in de ochtend:

Communities of Practice in het Nederlands leerlandschap.
Leren gebeurt op veel plaatsen en manieren. Communities of practice
zijn sociale leerplaatsen waar kwesties die mensen raken de
aanleiding vormen voor leren. Mensen starten daarmee vanuit een wil
om een verschil te maken. De ontstaansgeschiedenis verloopt niet via
een formele structuur, maar via de informele energie die zich rond
een gemeenschappelijke vraag manifesteert. Daardoor ontstaat de CoP.
In dit spoor willen we de karakteristieken en werkzame patronen
optekenen van het voortdurend ontstaan van uiteenlopende vormen van
collectief leren. Hoe kan deze verzamelde kennis ons helpen in ons
dagelijks werk? Deelnemers aan dit spoor wordt gevraagd om een eigen
ervaring in te brengen.

Er is ruimte voor 100 mensen. Geinteresseerd? Laat het me weten via een comment of email.

link

http://www.wikisym.org/ws2008/index.php/Main_Page

seems like a cool conference in Porto on wikis, 8-10 sept.

Reconsidering place

Yes! “using the Internet to strengthen your local relations”, here for learning and teaching. This post (David Wilcox) inspired my re-considering place. I am interested how the Internet can help to form and strengthen social and productive networks. I agree with the freeschool people that f2f contact is vital. And for that you need to be geographically close to each other.

There is another reason to “upgrade” the importance of location in online social networking. Coming from a (rural) development/natural resource managment background, in my thinking, many issues that need our attention are tied to the land, are localized and need local actors to get involved and undertake collective action. That we now can span distance in our communnications, does not mean we should. The former conversations at the cattle market/local cafe/water pump need to be restored -and improved. If the Net is going to be important for collective action we need better tools to locally connect. The tools are developing: postal coded search, google maps will have a role to play, portals, many local initiatives, postal coded E-bay, this freeschool. But starting from what instead of where, will organise people thematically again, not geographically. What we need is geographical initiatives, with “plug-ins” for ebay, freeschool, etc.

Make Your Own Sense

So much to read, hard to keep up with the new blogs, books, sites tagged by fellows, and projects. For me, blogging is not about being a thought leader, not even about being a pointer to resources or current debates. It is to make my own sense of the world. Making your own sense common.

As I want to restructure my blogs, I have been thinking about blogging. I have been looking at other consultants blogs. In KM consultants blogs, the tension between blogging for (1) sensemaking; blogging for (2) community strengthening or (3) for getting more work, remains.

(1) Sensemaking can be very individual, or peer-assisted sensemaking; personal archiving and writing about thoughts, floating ideas;
(2) Strengthening (your belonging in) a community you are part of; writing about domain or community stuff;
(3) Attracting or generating potential clients or potential projects to work on; writing what you currently do, demonstrating, opening up.

I know examples of purebreds of all three, but actually the purebreds are rare and most blogs are somewhere in the middle, alternating and / or mixing. Maybe the tension can be worded as the basic question: why do you blog? for personal learning, for a stronger community, or for getting jobs. The answer, i guess, is: It depends where you get the value from.

Every time I speak to real-world-people I realize how few are reading blogs, how few know tagging or rss. There is *no* overlap between friends I first met off line and friends I met online. None. I have met many online friends in real life, but have not been able to introduce off-line friends to web2.0. I keep trying, but after years, my rule-to-go-by is: /In real life, people do not read blogs.  /

And one of the effects of “being-read-mostly-by-likeminded” (web2.0 literates) is that you start to write for them. That is becoming where you get most feedback, most value from.

My very visible dairy community blog (example of no. 2) gets less comments than this blog, (example of no. 1) which I have often tried to somewhat obscure. I have experienced the use of a blog as a sense making instrument. I have returned to it and value it. Also, I would like to find ways for getting more work.

Earlier, I did not expect that those who might be interested in hiring me, or those in my different communities, to also be interested in the intricacies and longwindedness of my personal learning; and I am not at all sure about wanting them there. That is why I had a separate static info-site, and a (somewhat obscured) blog (this). But it feels distributed. And maybe I have changed in my ideas of who might hire me?

We-think in our expertise

This video (by Charles Leadbeater) explains again what is so thrilling and new about the the “social web”. I realize I have fallen into the trap of blogging only about web2.0 and social media and blogs… which I always thought was kind of poor. We better blog about our own practice, our real profession.

So this is posted here with a clear question in mind. What does it mean for agriculture? For rural areas? for multistakeholder problems? How is it used, practically, for collective action?

Links

http://www.alliancemagazine.org/free/html/dec07e.html

title: Measuring impact? who counts? David Bonbright

This article is an attempt to chronicle the emergence of a new generation of concepts, tools, platforms and organizations designed to measure quality social change work. the article breathes philantropy and US context– but it shows a positive picture:

“Whereas a decade ago there was a great clamour for ‘generally accepted principles’ of impact measurement based on a unified and quantifiable approach, current thinking favours a much friendlier pluralistic model in which qualitative, quantitative, perceptual and empirical data can be assembled into a comprehensible whole that still honours the complexity of social change. Including and systematizing “constituency voice” for impact assessment in social change programmes.”

—————–

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free?currentPage=all

Article on the new book  by Chris Anderson (the Long Tail) about the economy of free.

We are destroying the planet in our consumption race because the price of products does not represent their real cost, such as environmental costs. Anderson predicts many things will become a lot cheaper still, even free. To me this sounds wrong: of course there is a cost, only it are not the users, but others paying for it. Complex three way markets evolve. Users ‘trade’ something -whether data or access or other, is often not known- to get a free service in return. But Anderson is positive, and thinks it is a shift away from money focus to a more realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today.   

<<The word is externalities, a concept that holds that money is not the only scarcity in the world. Chief among the others are your time and respect (…)  There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities — and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later. Free shifts the economy from a focus on only that which can be quantified in dollars and cents to a more realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today. >>

—————
http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Make_Money_Around_Free_Content

list of “business models” around free content

Preliminary notes on Weinbergers book “Everything is miscellaneous”

Still reading.

Miscellany, or rather Miss Eleny, is becoming a dear friend of mine. It feels like we have always known each other. There are just so many interesting ways of making sense of the world.

Yet. I like trees. And I like for leaves to be on certain, designated branches. To take notice of structures other people have applied, to see what they deemed important, helps me make sense of the world. It helps me to learn from them, to read their mind. It feels great to agree with others on how to make sense of something. To belong. It’s what we do in our lifes. Making common sense.

Blended organizations

The example below for me illustrates what i said in my previous blogpost: “Organizations will stay. Bosses will stay. But still, things will change and gradually, this will have deep impact.”

Andrew McAfee describes how organizations transitioning to be “Enterprise2.0″ could have tools that respect existing organization structures, yet still  foster freeform and emergent collaboration.

Awareness Networks builds, hosts, and deploys integrated E2.0 suites for an impressive roster of customers. Each Awareness installation is called a ‘community,’ and each community can contain multiple neighborhoods. Neighborhoods are simply ways to categorize the content that gets contributed over time, and are defined in advance by the people who commissioned the site. Since these people are usually the bosses of the company (or are at least acting on their behalf) neighborhoods tend to reflect the formal organizational structure or goals of the company, or some combination of the two. (…)

Bosses can control who has the ability to view, comment, edit, post, and vote by neighborhood. People can blog, contribute to wikis, participate in polls, votes, and discussions, upload photos and videos, etc. within any of these neighborhoods. Search, tagging, and linking work across all the content that a user can access, regardless of neighborhood.   (…) An Awareness community therefore has both imposed and emergent structure, in what feels to me like the right proportions.

Organizations Differently Organized

Still mulling over our debate blogposts some time ago, about “The End of the Organization?”.

I argued, with the author Michael Gilbert, that organizations will change importantly, as they are shaped by communication, and communication is fundamentally changing.

Others have listed Arguments why Organizations would NOT change very much:

• Andy said: The economical is far more important for the shape of our organizations than communication. Organizations -even non-profits- are mainly shaped by profit and free market and private ownership.
• Joitske said: Values and aim are important for the shape of organizations, communication is secondary to that. (But the role of managers will change.)
• Miguel said: The nature of organizations, and the reasons why they are here are not going away. Organizations are coherent and can deal with responsibilities, where ecosystems and /or netweroks cannot.
• Hang said: We all want freedom, but a certain degree of organization is needed, otherwise it is not practical and very expensive.

And I agree and would add:

• Regulatory frameworks are not changing.
• We are used to our present way of organizing. It’s engrained in our cultures and systems. We LIKE hierarchies, we like things to be orderly and controlled. We entertain ourselves with office politics; we will not easily accept a more miscellaneous way of organization.
• Fear and lack of imagination will make us hold on to what we know.
• We are incapable of coming up with tangible models for more networked systems to operate.

These are of course all interrelated; we want to pin down responsabilities, as Miguel said, and in the networks that are fuzzy and in constant flux, this cannot be done.
So I agree that organizations are here to stay. When you immerse yourself in web2.0 and only talk (or rather, skype, phone, chat, blog, tweet) with others that populate this small universe, it is easy to think differently. But it will not happen. Not in the next few decades.What will happen (IS happening) is new practices, new types or organizing in the margins. And gradually, social media will have deep impacts.
I tried to think of what is new in (some) organizations (besides the earlier listed ones).

• Marketing: community marketing, viral marketing, conversational marketing
• Changing business models (music, media)
• Firewalls becoming more permeable
• Control over employees’ communications is impossible; this in itself is not new. What is new, is that personal and professional identities are more blurred and more of the communication leaves a track now.
• Recruiting: taking place in more locations, in a more conversational style.
• Selection: googling and socialnetworking / blog in addition to CV
• Slow percolation of the social “mores” of social networking on the workfloor? Questions like who to trust, who is an authority, who to grant access to what. may be answered very differently today than 5 yrs ago and 5 yrs form now. Whoever demonstrates ability is an authority: shift towards meritocracy?
• Knowledge workers becoming even more mindful of their own learning path and personal portfolio, and increasing number of free-lancers.
• Networked free-lancers operating as a company.

I would be interested to read my co-debaters on this, as I am sure I there is lots to add.

Overheard

two men:

-”no, I don’t work on Fridays. I take care of the kids.”

-”are you divorced then?”