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Digital Habitats Nov09 Frameworks
The document discusses how technology has changed how groups can interact and be together. It explores polarities around togetherness and separateness, interacting and publishing, and individual and group identities. It then examines how different orientations like meetings, projects, relationships, and individual participation can be supported through various technologies. Examples are provided of how the Birdwatchers community and KM4Dev network demonstrate different orientations. The document is intended to help people identify what technologies and tools might best support their specific community's needs and activities.
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Digital Habitats Nov09 Frameworks
- 1. Making sense of the technology landscape for groups & communities Nancy White Full Circle Associates Digital Habitats
- 2. Tech + Social:Technology has fundamentally changed how we can be together
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- 4. Togetherness SeparatenessInteracting/participation Publishing/reification Individual Group
- 5. TOGETHERNESS SEPARATENESShttp://www.flickr.com/photos/angerboy/201582453/
- 6. community time communityspace shifting engagement….
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- 9. Vocabularies, tools, concepts,methods, stories, papers, pictures, reports… Conversing, experimenting, practicing, learning, planning…
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- 12. Fly with theflock?
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- 14. Many: Networks We: Communities Me: the Individual Personal identity, interest & trajectory Bounded membership; group identity, shared interest Boundaryless; fuzzy, intersecting interests
- 15. Many: Networks We: Communities Me: the Individual Individual learning, personal learning environments … Classes, informal learning cohorts, conferences, clubs… Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc…
- 16. Designed for groups,experienced as individuals Does not imply homogeneity Multimembership Attention
- 17. Togetherness SeparatenessInteracting/participation Publishing/reification Individual Group
- 18. Tech + Social:Technology has fundamentally changed how we can be together
- 19. What the %&*#is a technology steward to do? http://www.flickr.com/photos/dani3l3/364684710/ Nancy White Full Circle Associates
- 20. enable people to…discover & appropriate useful technology be in and use communities & networks (people) express their identity find and create content usefully participate
- 21. Digital Habitats Orientation Spidergram Activity From: Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities Etienne Wenger, Nancy White & John. D. Smith, 2009 http:// www.technologyforcommunities.com http://www.flickr.com/photos/viamoi/3221971368/
- 22. … meetings… relationships … community cultivation … access to expertise … projects … context … individual participation … content publishing … open-ended conversation Community activities oriented to … Base material from: Digital Habitats: Stewarding technology for communities © 2009 Wenger, White, and Smith
- 23. Meetings –in person or online gatherings with an agenda (i.e. monthly topic calls) Projects – interrelated tasks with specific outcomes or products (i.e. Identifying a new practice and refining it.) Access to expertise – learning from experienced practitioners (i.e. access to subject matter experts) Relationship – getting to know each other (i.e. the annual potluck dinner!) Context – private, internally-focused or serving an organization, or the wider world (i.e. what is kept within the community, what is shared with the wider world) Community cultivation – Recruiting, orienting and supporting members, growing the community (i.e. who made sure you’re the new person was invited in and met others?) Individual participation – enabling members to craft their own experience of the community (i.e. access material when and how you want it.) Content – a focus on capturing and publishing what the community learns and knows (i.e. a newsletter, publishing an article, etc.) Open ended conversation – conversations that continue to rise and fall over time without a specific goal (i.e. listserv or web forum, Twitter, etc.) Base material from: Digital Habitats: Stewarding technology for communities © 2009 Wenger, White, and Smith Orientations What do they mean?
- 24. activities oriented to … Example: The Birdwatchers of Central Park … open-ended conversation … meetings … projects … access to expertise … relationships … context … community cultivation … individual participation … content publishing Weekly bird walks, winter bird feeding fillings, irregular celebrations and events… Advocacy drives, adopt parts of the park, bird counts… The participation of the “Big Guns,” and “Regulars.” Mostly F2F Note when people missing… Invite people in Internal and External focus: Publishing, the “Register,” available to media… While everyone pays attention to the community, no centralized efforts… Anyone can bird watch, but sharing what you see/know is important…so the community accommodates both The “Register” (print) is central to community… Bump into another bird-watcher? Have a conversation… Base material from: Digital Habitats: Stewarding technology for communities, © 2009 Wenger, White, and Smith
- 25. activities oriented to … Community Name: KM4Dev global knowledge sharing network … open-ended conversation … meetings … projects … access to expertise … relationships … context … community cultivation … individual participation … content publishing Base material from: Digital Habitats: Stewarding technology for communities © 2009 Wenger, White, and Smith With only one meeting a year, large size and diversity, KM4Dev focuses on enabling individual participation. Community knowledge wiki, content management system to bring together resources. Email list is core of community activity Once a year and only about 10% do/can participate. When funding allows. E.G. supporting ShareFair Informally via the email list by asking/answering questions. Relationships mostly via meetings and core group. Strongly external – all resources public/shared. While everyone pays attention to the community, no centralized efforts…
- 26. activities oriented to … Birdwatchers and KM4Dev-ers … open-ended conversation … meetings … projects … access to expertise … relationships … context … community cultivation … individual participation … content publishing Base material from: Digital Habitats: Stewarding technology for communities © 2009 Wenger, White, and Smith
- 27. What can wedo with this? Identify where your community/group/team is now to assess for design, facilitation and technology stewardship. Refocus activities to increase engagement Identify tools and processes to support current activities Identify where your group wants to go as a planning tool. Look backwards and forwards as a reflection tool. Base material from: Digital Habitats: Stewarding technology for communities © 2009 Wenger, White, and Smith
- 28. activities oriented to … Community Name: … open-ended conversation … meetings … projects … access to expertise … relationships … context … community cultivation … individual participation … content publishing Base material from: Digital Habitats: Stewarding technology for communities © 2009 Wenger, White, and Smith Put a mark on the arrow to indicate how important a particular orientation is to your community. The more important the orientation, the further out on the arrow the dot should be placed. Then draw a line between the dots. See the next example.
- 29. Meetings –Web meeting tools for online, shared calendars and wikis for planning, wikis, blogs, images/audio/video to capture and share during and after. Projects – Email lists/forums to coordinate, shared calendars, project management trackers, blogs to journal/report. Access to expertise – Online profiles, social networking sites, “yellow pages,” discussion forums, blogs. Relationship – Twitter/IM to share small frequent messages, member directories, Skype/VoIp for conversation. Context – Public, open websites for outward facing. Password protected for inward facing groups. Community cultivation – Outward facing web sites to attract members, Twitter/IM to feel connected, Skype for voice. Individual participation – RSS/aggregators, tagging, so people can craft what content they get, customizable settings on web tools, using synch and asynch Content – content management systems, blogs, wikis, podcasts, social bookmarking, tags, video/audio, images, mindmapping. Open ended conversation – email lists, forums, Twitter, chat. Base material from: Digital Habitats: Stewarding technology for communities © 2009 Wenger, White, and Smith Orientations Picking tools? How?
- 30. For Reflecting Together… Group form: small, pairs, or full group? Visibility: Public or private? Style: Format? Editable? Commentable? Images? What else? Portability: Export? Republish? Aggregate?
- 31. More? Nancy White[email_address] http:// www.fullcirc.com www.technologyforcommunities.com http://www.flickr.com/photos/poagao/527259905/
Editor's Notes
- #5 Sliders – as we think about how we pick, design and deploy technology, what sort of intentionality do we want with respect to these tensions? More importantly, how do we use them as ways to track our community’s health, make adjustments in both technology and practice.
- #6 http://www.flickr.com/photos/angerboy/201582453/ The elements of time and space present a challenge for communities. Forming a community requires more than one transient conversation or having the same job title in completely different settings. The kind of learning that communities of practice strive for requires a sustained process of mutual engagement, and if mutual engagement is the key to learning, separation in time and space can make community difficult. How can a community sustain an experience of togetherness across the boundaries of time and space? How can members experience togetherness through shared activities if they cannot be together face-to-face? How can the togetherness of a few members (a small meeting, a conversation) become an experience the whole community shares?
- #7 Technology creates “community time” that defies schedules and time zones, and “communal spaces” that do not depend on physical location. One obvious appeal of technology is its variety of solutions for dealing with time and space to achieve continuity and togetherness: to hold a meeting at a distance, to converse across time zones, to make a recording of a teleconference available, to include people who cannot be physically present, to send a request or a file, or to be up-to-date on an interesting project. In a community version of “time shifting” and even “space shifting,” togetherness happens in a variety of formats that enable participation “anytime, anywhere.” Practice issues: Community profiles as patterns of togetherness. How do we learn best. Respect the time of each member. Front or back channel, what problems to bring to the whole group.
- #8 Members of a community of practice need to interact with each other as well as produce and share artifacts such as documents, tools, and links to resources. Sharing artifacts without interacting can inhibit the ability to negotiate the meaning of what is being shared. Interacting without producing artifacts can limit the extent and impact of learning. Indeed, the theory of communities of practice views learning together as involving the interplay of two fundamental processes of meaning making: Members engage directly in activities, interactions, conversations, reflections, and other forms of personal participation in the learning of the community; members produce physical and conceptual artifacts—words, tools, concepts, methods, stories, documents, and other forms of reification —that reflect their shared experience and around which they organize their participation. (Literally, reification means “making into an object.”) Meaningful learning in a community requires both processes to be present. Sometimes one may dominate the other. They may not always be complementary to each other. The challenge of this polarity is how successfully communities cycle between the two.
- #9 Technology provides so many new ways to interact and publish while supporting the interplay of participation and reification that it can profoundly change the experience of learning together. Technology enables new kinds of interactions, activities, and access to other people. It also provides new ways to produce, share, and organize the results of being together – through documents, media files, and other artifacts. Most important, it affords new ways to combine participation and reification. For instance, by providing a web-based whiteboard for a conversation, we are supporting new forms of co-authorship where we casually mix words, images and sounds with each other . Technology also pushes the boundaries of both interacting and publishing for a community. It makes it easier for the work of a community to be opened up to the larger world. It can allow a community to decide whether to publish artifacts and invite comments publicly or to hold them within the private boundaries of the community.
- #10 Examples of publishing and interacting (or participation and reification.)
- #11 Individuals and groups. Togetherness is a property of communities but individual members experience it in their own ways. A crucial point about learning within communities of practice is that being together does not imply, require, or produce homogeneity. Togetherness is a complex state that weaves communal and individual engagement, aspirations, and identities. Technology provides new opportunities for togetherness, but togetherness can lead to disagreement and the discovery that people see the world (including technology) very differently. Members use the technology individually, on their own. Some social trends contribute to the tension inherent in this polarity: Increasingly, individuals are not members of only one community; they are participants in a substantial number of communities, teams, and networks—active in some, less so in others. Communities cannot expect to have the full attention of their members nor can they assume that all their members have the same levels of commitment and activity, the same learning aspirations, and therefore the same needs. Conversely, members must deal with the increasing volume and complexity of their “multi-membership” in different communities. They have to find meaningful participation in all these relationships while preserving a sense of their own identity across contexts.
- #13 http://www.flickr.com/photos/27126314@N03/2956992219/
- #14 http://www.flickr.com/photos/gustavog/9708628/
- #15 You can be clear when we talk about the individual, me. We can be clear when we have bounded communities with clear establishment of in/out membership. We can also have communities with fuzzy boundaries, which may even be networks.
- #16 You can be clear when we talk about the individual, me. We can be clear when we have bounded communities with clear establishment of in/out membership. We can also have communities with fuzzy boundaries, which may even be networks.
- #17 One role of technology is to help manage the complexities of community life and individual participation. Technology can make the community visible in new ways through directories, maps of member locations, participation statistics, and graphic representations of the health of the community. It can provide tools for individuals to filter information to fit their needs, to locate others, to find connections, to know when and where important activities are taking place, and to gather the news feeds from their various communities in one place. In fact, multi-membership is becoming so prevalent that tools to manage the group/individual polarity are becoming an increasingly central contribution of technology.
- #18 Sliders – as we think about how we pick, design and deploy technology, what sort of intentionality do we want with respect to these tensions? More importantly, how do we use them as ways to track our community’s health, make adjustments in both technology and practice.
- #20 Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dani3l3/364684710/
- #21 These roles and practices create the conditions that enable people to….
- #22 This activity comes out of a chapter in our book that looks at the activity orientations of communities of practice and how this might drive both the technology stewardship and the overall community nurturing and leadership activities. In this context, we are using it to explore the application of social media to a particular goal you might have.
- #23 In our research of CoPs we noticed 9 general patterns of activities that characterized a community’s orientation. Most had a mix, but some were more prominent in every case. Image: Wenger, White and Smith, 2007
- #24 Before you do the Spidergram exercise, read through the orientations and think of some examples from a number of contexts. I’ll offer two examples as well in subsequent slides.
- #25 Here is an example drawn from the book “Red-Tails in Love: Pale Male’s Story -- A True Wildlife Drama in Central Park” by Marie Winn. Vintage Books, 2005 The book tells of a community of bird watchers in Central Park and exquisitely describes their practices. This is a predominantly face to face group that might use some social media, but not as their central way of interacting. They are a large, diverse group, but tightly geographically bound to Central Park in New York City. They might fill this spidergram differently than I might, but this is just an example! Image: Wenger, White and Smith, 2007
- #26 KM4Dev (http://www.km4dev.org) is a global network of practitioners interested in knowledge management and knowledge sharing in international development. Over 800 members are subscribed to the email list which had it’s origins in July 2000. It is both a well established but loosely bounded network that interacts primarily online, with once a year meetings that a small subset attend.
- #27 You can see how different groups have different priorities. It is a bit like a community activity “finger print.” The next step is to think about what tools support the different orientations.
- #28 What was interesting was that these orientations had implications beyond communities. They could be a useful analysis, diagnostic and measurement tool for the application of social media to an organization’s work.
- #29 What would your Spidergram look like? Think of a specific group or project that you want to explore. What activities do you need to support? Which are more important than others? Put a mark on the arrow to indicate how important a particular orientation is to your community. The more important the orientation, the further out on the arrow the dot should be placed. Then draw a line between the dots. Clarification: For context, towards the middle means a more inward (private) orientation and towards the outer edge a more public/open orientation. Discuss the spidergram with your group or community. Do they see it differently? Adjust your image to get the fullest view possible. Then, and only then, start thinking about tools. Always start with WHAT you want to do before the HOW!
- #30 Here are some examples of social media tools that support the orientations. Keep in mind that while a tool may have been designed for a specific purpose, people regularly and imaginatively use them in different ways.