Using the example of a church that is both a community and an organization to examine how technology shapes identity, togetherness, and competence. Brings together Hidalgo's framework on computation with Wenger's community of practice theory. Discusses how organizations can be intimately intertwined with the communities that they serve.

1. Be here when—
the crazy wisdom of
communities and how they use
technology to design themselves
John David Smith
A few years ago at Ecotrust, I heard a few people say, “They just don’t get it” several times. I decided that what they meant was: “somebody else doesn’t get it, we do
get it, and they ought to.” If we unpack it, it could be a subtitle for this year’s CHIFOO talks. Few “tips” tonight, but we’ll focus on what people “get” or don’t — in
CHIFOO and other communities.

2. “They don’t get it…”
• What we seek to “get” in CHIFOO
has evolved from“button color
and function” to: “design for
community”
… from “bad design” to
“bounded irrationality”
• “They don’t get it” is a bit
negative, but implies
• assertion of meaning
• a regime of competence
• a regime of accountability
• Talking about “who gets it” (or
doesn’t) is a way into the social
nature of knowing
In 2016 so far we’ve been talking about “who gets it”:
• Presuming we don’t get it but can through the design process
• Mapping what people don’t get
• Connecting and appropriating what others do get
• Mapping pathways that people already get (but we don’t unless we pay attention)
tonight: Trying to get how technology and knowledge work in free-standing organizations and communities. Communities of practice, specifically, as learning vehicles or holders of wisdom and
knowledge.

3. Emergence & growth of community
• Cesar Hidalgo: How Info Grows
• Community formation enables
growth of knowledge (limits it?)
• Knowledge is sticky because
communities grow in place, are
not really portable
• Community is one example of “a
system that responds to inputs by
changing state and producing a
fixed physical output”
… much like: cells, moss,
knowledge workers,
communities, companies,
economies — and computers
Calculating the
incidence of heavy metals
Computation is happening around us at many levels of scale, including the moss that “measures” and “remembers” the incidence of heavy metals in its environment.
The results of computation are portable, but computational capacity is quite sticky because it’s embedded in networks, which are not portable. From this perspective we
are all social computers embedded in networks of computation, interfacing with other computers of all sorts.

4. Framework #1
Thinking about computational capacity
Condition,
energy,
or substrate Ingredients
History Resources
AntibodiesPlatforms
Platform,
or outcome
Products
Identities
Structure
Knowledge
Memory
Out-of-
equilibrium
systems
Accumulation
of information
in solids
Ability
of matter
to compute
Network,
practice or,
place
Connections
Belonging
Synapses
Networks
Channels
Imagination
Ideas
What we humans compute (aka, thinking, imagining) is not just “products” (like Hidalgo emphasizes) but our identity, our choice of tools, and our position in various
communities. Communities, like us, then compute their future. And thus humanity computes its future.
These 3 levels can be used as a “guiding”, not cognitive notions. “Out of equilibrium systems” means “relatively stable energy sources”.

5. Consulting about communities
• “We’d like 3 of those CoPs…”
• As designed & sold “things”
• Exclusive focus on community
launch — “build from scratch”
• Wanting arms-length
involvement and fast payoff
• Over-emphasis on technology
(which was “owned by IT”)
What did clients not get?
What could technology not do?
What could I do?
Technology
Stewardship
Although I made a living teaching and helping organizations establish communities and to deploy community-enabling technologies, the logics of organizations and
communities often seemed to be in conflict. Digital Habitats was an attempt to frame the use of technology on behalf of communities, but we’ve found it’s hard to do
and even harder to “teach”. And technology stewardship is almost more sticky than the communities themselves. The question of what I didn’t understand about
organizations and communities kept coming up.

6. Churches & spiritual groups
are both organizations and communities
They are:
• Ubiquitous & impactful
• Diverse in form, size, scope
• Persistent
But also:
• Community and organization
confounded
• Taboo to investigate?
• They themselves mis-recognize
• Over-emphasis on “domain”
• Nested, network structure
• Important physical heritage
• Lack of technology stewardship
Photo: Steve Morgan
from Wikipedia
But what do they compute?
I realized I had a perfect technology stewardship laboratory close at hand. Churches are spiritual communities and non-profit businesses so they are communities and
organizations at the same time. Had already worked with Baptists, Lutherans, Unitarians, Jews, and Buddhists. Scholars like Sean Egerton show how the social network
structure of churches are profound, impactful, and often ignored.

7. How to compute new insights
• Keeping an eye on
theoretical frameworks
• Being relevant in practice
(but not as a consultant)
• Detecting blind spots as
well as noticing insights
Mi blind spot es su
blind spot?
Over the past 3 years I’ve been the tech steward for Shambhala here in Portland (as well as working at Shambhala’s international level). Able to do a lot of work bridging
between the work I did in organizations for 15 years and this opportunity for close study.

8. Working three stories
Why stories?
• Have just enough context
• Expose frameworks
• Are the food (or drink) of
communities of practice
Minimum viable frameworks
1. Information growth (Hidalgo)
2. CPD (Wenger)
3. Organization & Community
configuration (me)
Tonight’s stories
1. Membership & phone bridge
2. Memory practices
3. Tech, CoP and Org in a race
Yea, that reminds me
of the time that…
Apart from the 3 frameworks this presentation is about story-swapping. Hard data and tips are not allowed.

9. Framework #2
Community, Practice, Domain
• CPD is essential model to
understand CoPs (Wenger)
• Communities of Practice: about
“getting” knowledge or skill
• For CHIFOO:
D: Computer / human
interaction
P: Meet & talk about design
C: Portland, members, friends
• Each affects and depends on
the other two
• CoPs need legs are seen as
platforms by enterprises
(e.g., Framework # 1)
Domain
Practice Community
Three very different kinds of computation
CPD is also a guiding concept. Could say that individuals are computing all three. Communities of practice are computing all three at the same time as well.

10. Using CPD to understand Shambhala
• Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
(CTR) was the 11th Trungpa
Tulku, escaped Tibet, set aside
his robes, settled in Colorado to
teach, founded Shambhala
• After reading 2 of his books, I
arrived in Boulder, Colorado on
August 10, 1975
• “Am I a member?” becomes an
important element of identity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_wisdom
• Domain: Buddhist insights from Tibet; how to be a good person
• Community: western students in Boulder (and elsewhere)
• Practice: meditation, “getting a job”
I took offense in the 80’s at a visiting monastic’s comment that it was “very nice that we had a member of the Sangha in our midst (referring to Trungpa, Rinpoche)”.
Different understanding of “membership” as part of the translation process. Effect of technology on membership.

11. a. b. c. d.
Midwives
Church-goers,
Meditators, …
Engineers
Legislative
auditors
Framework #3
Configurations of Community and Organization
Now for some of my
stories about the
Shambhala
meditation centers
Originally, a community of practice was an anthropologist’s device for taking an agnostic look at learning (not captured by the idea of “school”), to understand the social
nature of learning in different settings. It turned out to be useful for looking at and supporting learning in organizations like HP or Shell. The first 3 configuration are
roughly connected with different books on the subject:
a. Lave & Wenger
b. Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder ’98
c. Wenger, White & Smith
d. tonight

12. Some contrasts between organization
and community
Organization Community
Rests upon Social or economic system Social fabric
Roles Contracted / appointed Negotiated / evolved
Entity boundary Coase’s Theorem
Legitimate peripheral
participation
Legitimacy A legal person A long tradition
Representation
Hierarchical organization
chart
Texts, places, events
Outcomes Adding to a value chain
Belonging, identity,
learning
As we will see, community and organization are more contrasting social forms than completely distinct entities. The reason it’s important to draw the contrast is that
technology (which can have a big impact on communities) is almost always owned and operated by an organization.

13. Story #1:
Technology confirms community
• CTR liked to address all his
students on Tibetan New Year
— like the Queen’s Address to
the Nation on Christmas Day
• Geeks hacked a Radio Shack
speaker phone - instead of
mailing recordings on
cassettes in 1981
• Volunteers made it up &
collected the money to do it
• “Roll Call” was a technical
protocol that became an
important community
experience
Can you hear me now?
First story, is not digital and computers are not visible at the beginning. A recurring social event was established partly as a result of technical improvisation. Let’s listen
in about 12 years after the phone link had gotten started.

14. Roll-call as community platform
• Rooster crowing was for “Year of
the Rooster” — January 23, 1993
• A technology hack expanded the
awareness of community
• Recognizing voices, recognizing
improvisation, tolerating and
celebrating bloopers
• Self-design and self-discovery on
many levels and dimensions,
including funding practices
• Persistent glitches as a stimulus to
innovation
Happy New Year!
What happened
• Visibility of “us” (as a community) relative to the teacher’s New Year’s address
• Contributions and failures of a few geeks acquire an organizational role
• As technology and organization evolve, the limitations of improv and of specific technologies start to show
• Organization supports evolution of the event

15. Time (and increasing organization)
Number
of
sites
Audio
cassettes
by mail
Conference
Call
Alternative
Conference
Call
Vendors
Video
Conferencing
Alternative
Streaming
Services
Pre-
recorded
videos +
slides
Pre-
recorded
speakers
Evolution of the New Year’s event
Being Together
Broadcast
Broadcast
Over 50 years the event was invented, evolved and changed from being a completely improvised community thing to a polished fund-raiser (that was ignored in
Portland).

16. Framework #3
Organizations & Communities + Technology
a. b. c. d.
Midwives
Church-goers,
Meditators, etc.
Engineers
Legislative
auditors
How do communities &
organizations overlap,
benefit or limit each other?
Can technology
(that is owned by organizations)
serve communities, too?
Back to the different ways organizations and communities can be configured. Each also has different technology issues. Technology is most often owned and controlled
by organizations. It has different functions and is experienced differently by organizations and communities.

17. Story # 2
Community and organization in
Portland
• In Shambhala, volunteers do
most of the work including
governance
• Staffing & skill set constraints
• Memory requirements of the
organization
• Enough details remembered
• Agreement
• Non-repudiation
• Cost
• Timeliness
• Accomplished within the
community’s resources Communities and organizations have
different memory practices
Second story. Community and organization interpenetrate. How an organizational requirement is met with community strategies. There is an organization within the
community and within the organization is a group that governs: a little community of practice focused on governance of an organization and its community.

18. Successive Council Secretaries:
a poet, an MD…
Tried them all:
• Individual recollection
• Individual hand-written notes
• Shared agendas on paper with
hand-written notes
• After-the-fact transcription
• Individual Google Doc for
“minutes”
• Finally landed on a shared
Google Doc
“Any bad policy can look good
if only considered over a
short enough period of time” ~ Jay Forrester
Each Council secretary brought a unique solution to the problem of group memory.

19. A college student with new skills tried:
• A monthly Google Doc
Meeting agenda
Individual reports
Real-time minute taking
Links added on the fly
Preserving history
Publishing (redacted) history
• Shaping
• organizational memory
• produced by members
• much greater detail
Result: from “no computers” in a semi-circle on meditation cushions to a meeting around a table where everyone has a computer and is connected to the internet and
seeing what is being written on our behalf.

20. Story # 3:
A 3-way race
• Shambhala database started in
2001 — a European initiative to
help people find each other
• Now a centralized data base for
calendars, registration,
membership, contacts, email
• Implemented with MySQL,
WordPress, MailChimp, home
grown functions, etc.
• Designed & managed by part-
time paid staff, but operated by
100s of volunteers
Basis of community &
organization memory
Third example: Organization serves the community by helping people “see” each other with less effort. Technology grows to serve a growing community and
organization.

21. Who doesn’t “get” this data resource?
• Reflecting community &
organization to
• Measure
• Compare
• Budget
• Forecast
• Tried alternative
• Delivery channels
• Formats
• Audiences
• Shambhala can’t see itself in its data
Growth
comparisons
Yet…
What I think others “should get”.

22. Community & organizational views
• Evolving maturity of
• Data literacy
• Technologies
• Member-leaders
(volunteers and paid staff)
• Views of data “ownership”:
• Organization vs.
community?
• Europeans vs. North
Americans attitudes about
privacy?
• Governance evolves along
with everything else
Straddling community
& organization
but not the Atlantic Ocean
Shambhala is a community of communities… Don’t yet have language to discuss data issues…
What are Shambhala values or views about data? Compared with German or North American values? A new domain topic.

23. My current learning agenda
• Power of self-funded platforms
and their limits
• Community self-design
• Technology stewardship
• Polarities
• Organization & community
• Local & federated
• Change & preserve
M.C. Escher,
“Drawing Hands”
from Wikipedia
What about us?
Self-organizing, self-funded churches must be vital communities and competent organizations, with technology to serve both. All three components face significant
computational challenges.
Hidalgo reminds us that all three (CPD) need energy sources, add to the world’s computational capacity, and serve as platforms for further evolution. The CPD model
reminds us that computation needs to happen along three different dimensions.

24. One more story…
Calculating CHIFOO challenges
• Humanity’s future includes many
more
• people
• computers
• interactions between them
• Growing expectations of all three
• CHIFOO’s attention embraces
• very small scale (e.g., buttons)
• business models
• larger aggregates & more
complex interactions (e.g.,
communities)
• We have a long history
• We have Portland!

25. What and how are we calculating?
• D: Topics?
• C: Membership? Boundaries?
Leadership?
• P: Methods? Interactions?
• Who “doesn’t get it”? (from our
perspective)
• “That client”
• “Those engineers”
• “Management”
Photo: Ann Marcus
Many individual ways of participating in the calculation. I’m often evasive or plain old tongue-tied when people ask me what I do at CHIFOOd. But very forthcoming and
chatty when it comes to live-tweeting during the talks.

26. Thanks!
• You!
• Sources
• Chögyam Trungpa & Co.
• Cesar Hidalgo 2014
• Etienne Wenger…
• Sean Everton (JOSS, 2015)
• Sean Murphy
• Wikipedia, Twitter, and Ann Marcus (for
images)

27. Enlightenment is the complete
absence of any promises. We have
to give up the tendency to look for
solid, serious, or magical results. We
have to give up trying to manufacture
results through gimmicks.
- Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche