Technology Stewardship Workshop Slides Nov09

Editor's Notes

• #2: Technology has fundamentally changed what it means to “be together.” In the digital age, there is a new set of practices and roles to support this “being together” – we call this technology stewardship. http://www.flickr.com/photos/poagao/527259919/
• #4: Much of what I’m going to share comes from the work Etienne Wenger, John Smith and I have been doing as part of a book we wrote together: “Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities.” You can read more about the book at http://technologyforcommunities.com Photo credits: Nancy White Painting: Honoria Starbuck
• #5: As we dug into the PRACTICES of technology stewardship, we realized they were part of a system, a habitat in which a group, community or network interacted. That there were intersections between the defined set of tools in a group and those used by individuals. There were overlaps and disconnects.
• #7: We have sought to find new labels for these ways of “being together.” What has been significant for me is that they express a continuum of being together.
• #9: 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.
• #11: 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.
• #12: 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.
• #13: Not clearly demarcated, but there are new roles and practices we are all taking on. http://www.flickr.com/photos/dsevilla/189528500/in/set-1368427/ Uploaded on July 14, 2006 by dsevilla
• #14: These roles and practices create the conditions that enable people to….
• #15: Three roles that I’ve been looking at are community leaders, network weavers and technology stewards. Community leaders are a more familiar role, helping defined groups achieve specific goals over a period of time. “Helping” may mean creating conditions, supporting the emergence of relationships or individual and/or group identity, managing, etc. Network weavers are a new role (See the work of June Holley et al at http://www.networkweaving.com/blog/) – “people who facilitate new connections and increase the quality of those connections.” In between community leaders and network weavers are technology stewards – they show up both in groups/communities AND networks.
• #16: Ten years ago, when someone wanted to set up a set of tools to support a community of practice, they called up IT. Install Lotus notes. “Give me a SharePoint set up.” And that was that. Communities rarely had control of their online environments. There was a gulf between designers and users. Unless of course, they were coders. Now we have access to a wide variety of tools, some of which are technically difficult to set up, and others that are available at a click of the button. Who is paying attention to these tools? Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dani3l3/364684710/
• #17: Technology stewardship is not a solo gig, but by, of and for the community. It is about that balance between control and emergence, between "self-organizing" and "organizing on behalf of others." It balances the wisdom of the group, with the reality of getting things done.
• #18: Stewardship typically includes selecting and configuring technology, as well as supporting its use in the practice of the community.” It’s not just an “up front set up role” but something that is part of the life of the community. Etienne Wenger says 'Design and little and practice a lot.'  That applies to any aspect of community leadership!
• #19: Tech stewardship goes far beyond the traditional IT tech support. It is tech with a community attitude, attention to how to adapt a tool to a community’s quirks and practices. It is about seeing and representing the community perspective first. Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/maykesplana/270819284/
• #20: We also recognized that technology stewardship can be about protecting a community from unwanted technology, from change that is so disruptive it fractures the community. It is balancing innovation with stable and productive practices. Noticing when not to use technology. When to just say NO! Like anything else, technology stewards can damage or limit their communities of they aren’t careful. This is not a romantic, utopian vision. Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/shannonpareil/107865884/
• #21: Technology stewardship has deep roots in the technology community. The initial revolution came when communities of technologists made their own tools for connecting and working together. Linus Torvolds called his community to create -- and it resulted in Linux. Designed with a community perspective, for a community. Photo credit: Nancy White
• #22: Today it’s a whole new game. We don’t have to accept what IT offers. We don’t have to be coders. We have a range of tools to use to do stuff together online. We can configure and integrate without knowing programming. Communities have options. So they need technology stewardship skills and practices Photo credits and source: http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=137506981&size=o http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulwatson/212446246/ http://business2.blogs.com/business2blog/2006/08/web_20_around_t.html
• #23: We have more ways of “being together” as we cross national, professional, and linguistic borders.  Our communities have become network like. Globalization. Our CoPs are no longer just products of our workplaces or associations. They are ours. And we have influence on our tools. Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/amstrad/29854045/
• #24: Technology stewardship is not a solo gig, but by, of and for the community. It is about that balance between control and emergence, between "self-organizing" and "organizing on behalf of others." It balances the wisdom of the group, with the reality of getting things done. Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/philwalter/348238734/
• #25: On the practical side, we’ll explore a few "rules of thumb" and  strategies for thoughtfully considering how we focus on technology stewardship in a Web 2.0 world from a community perspective. http://www.flickr.com/photos/angelamcdonald/94766928/in/photostream/ Uploaded on February 2, 2006 by ang (3 Girls & a Boy)
• #26: It is often improvisational and emergent. Rarely do communities have the luxury of time, money and talent to do complex technology implementation. So the ability to use what is at hand and make it work now is a crucial community stewardship practice. (More about Keith: http://socialinvention.net/aboutus.aspx)
• #27: A tech steward may be called upon to make sense of all the offerings of the market, scanning and selecting for her community. They start paying attention to working with the tensions between the individual and the group, synch and asynch group, interacting and publishing. Image credit: Wenger, White and Smith
• #28: 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.
• #29: 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?  
• #30: 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.
• #31: 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.  
• #32: 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.
• #33: Examples of publishing and interacting (or participation and reification.)
• #34: 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.  
• #35: 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.
• #36: Rhythms, Interactions, Identities. Sharepoint Wiki pages are useful in and of themselves with the polarities as we experience them. We can fit them into the your community’s configuration in ways that balance the polarities.
• #38: As we looked at a variety of communities of practice in our book research, we noticed that there activities that showed up in many communities. Not all of them in every community, but some were more important than others for each community.
• #39: 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.
• #40: 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
• #41: 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.
• #42: 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
• #43: 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.
• #44: 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.
• #45: 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.
• #46: 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!
• #47: 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.
• #49: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lynetter/421323707/in/set-72057594139269787/ Here’s the quote in full: "It is when people stop thinking of something as a piece of technology that the thing starts to have its biggest impact. Wheels, wells, books, spectacles were all once wonders of the world; now they are everywhere, and we can't live without them. The internet hasn't quite got to that point, but it is getting there." - The Guardian Nov 4 2006 technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1940641,00.html?g... Image from Flickr CC www.flickr.com/photos/mr_magoo_icu/172281846/ thanks to Mr Magoo ICU  Add your co
• #50: Our work started in the nest of communities of practice, but we have already seen the applicability of the frameworks we are developing in other types of communities: teams, groups and networks. As we test these ideas in real settings, we’re finding resonance for this community perspective on technology. Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/angelrays/354572601/
• #51: Interested in more? Keep in touch with Etienne, John and me via the book blog on my blog at the ridiculous URL on your screen . Tag resources technologystewardship on your favorite tagging engine. Tell me a story about your technology stewardship. Or, ask me later. Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cgommel/138167164/ All photos from Flickr are photos with Creative Commons licenses. Thanks to Beth Kanter, Etienne Wenger, John Smith, and Bev Trayner for their input.