Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities

For a couple of years it wasn’t “a book” but just “an update”. After our ideas started getting more interesting and more useful, I took to taunting my co-conspirators Etienne Wenger and Nancy White that what is now Digital Habitats “is actually a book.” Later, when we all admitted that it was indeed a book, we decided that it would be faster and easier to self-publish. We could write what we wanted, address an audience that may not yet exist, and be just as theoretical and just as practical as we wanted. And we did just that, learning all kinds of things as we went.

In the end we hired Michael Valentine to do the diagrams and book design, Peter + Trudy Johnson-Lenz to help with the editing, and Sunday Oliver to produce the index. Even with complete professionals on board with the project, we still maintained a do-it-yourself style. But I’m not sure about “fast” or “easy.”

An example of how doing it ourselves makes things not so fast was when we were looking at the “completed” index recently. We found that we had an entry for “folksonomy” in the glossary but it had disappeared from the book itself. Should we remove the entry from the glossary even after it was type-set? We decided that the index entry should point to the glossary and also say “See tagging,” index an entry that still had several mentions in the text. All well and good except for the fact that Etienne took it as a challenge to improve on the index. And he did find an instance where we had misspelled Marc Coenders’ name along the way and he will undoubtedly improve the index. But, working on the index do-it-yourself style has to get squeezed between hosting visitors from Hong Kong and Sydney, flying across the Atlantic Ocean at least once, and finishing overdue reports for less forgiving entities than you, the potential reader of the book.

So if not “so fast” or “so easy,” does self-publishing still seem like such a good idea? I think so. We’re still going to use a print on demand service and sell the book through Amazon and other channels. But we’ve decided to have CPsquare be the publisher of record in order to segregate the work from other projects and streamline it. Who knows what surprises lurk in the segregation and streamlining? As Jean Lave said, “That learning occurs is not problematic. What is learned is always complexly problematic.”

Jean Lave, “The Practice of Learning”, p 3-32 in Seth Chaiklin and Jean Lave (eds) Understanding Practice; perspectives on activity and context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

(Crossposted from my Full Circle Blog)

As part of CPSquare’s “Connected Futures” workshop exploring the use of web technologies in the service of communities of practice, we (John Smith and I!) asked Howard Rheingold to share a little bit about the Social Media Classroom (SMC) he developed as part of a MacArthur Foundation Award (A HASTAC award specifically).

We were interested to hear about the development both because we are using a hosted version of the SMC as our “home base” this iteration of the workshop, and because Howard’s project is a nice example of community technology stewardship. Every platform has its lineage, the experiences of the designers that inform design choices during development. What needs is it trying to meet? How can it do this in the simplest and elegant manner?

SMC is created on a Drupal base but customized to reflect what Howard thought would be useful for educators. But it is not just a technology platform. There is also a rich library of new media literacy resources and a community of practitioners. From the SMC website:

The Social Media Classroom (we’ll call it SMC) includes a free and open-source (Drupal-based) web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes—integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets , and video commenting are the first set of tools. The Classroom also includes curricular material: syllabi, lesson plans, resource repositories, screencasts and videos.

For communities picking or even building platforms for themselves, there are some nice pearls from Howard.

Click here to listen in: 30 Minutes with Howard Rheingold on the Social Media Classroom… and other stuff!

Some of the things Howard talked about included:

• the importance of an on-ramp to new media – with integration of tools being an important early experience that helps us be more confident when we start using tools in a more “free range” manner.
• the need for a new media literacy – just because we are all online doesn’t mean we understand and know how to use it. What are the essentials that make a difference?
• the origins and inspirations of some of the tools in the SMC
• Howard’s exploration of teaching at this phase in his career and the importance of a constructivist, participatory approach.

If you are interested in SMC for your learning context, you can download the software to your server, or if you don’t have access to a server or IT help, the project is offering a limited amount of hosted space. If you want to learn more and engage in the SMC c ommunity, join the community of practice.

Photo credit:vagawi

Tags: cp2tech03, podcast

Crossposted from my Full Circle Blog

I was cruising through my blog reader, hopelessly “behind” in reading (my own construction – I know I can “mark all read!”) and came upon a post from Vic Desotelle who pointed to a TED talk on Compassion which somehow lead me to a Garr Reynolds post about a TED Talk by Evan Williams of Twitter. (Talk about the network!)

The post had a quote that resonated with my experience as a technology steward to various communities.

Presentation Zen: TED talk: Twitter & the power of the unexpected

You never know how users will end up using your technology. Sometimes they end up using your product in creative ways that you could not possibly have thought of on your own.

As I work with NGOs attempting to roll out intranets and collaboration tools, I preach two things:

• technology is designed for groups, but experienced by individual
• users are creative – use that as a powerful positive force rather than trying to get them to conform with rules and limitations.

These two tenets have significance for technology stewards. It means that they cannot assume that the members of their community will have the same experience they do with any particular tool or platform, and that over time, the community will continue on a predictable trajectory of use of that technology.

It is about a dynamic evolution of practices and applications of the technology, not about the installation or the simple availability of the tool. So here are some practice hints.

• Role model your experience and practices with tools, but don’t present them as the only options.
• Watch for experimentation and amplify new, useful practices. Better yet, encourage community members to talk about and share their practices.
• When members ask for tool adjustments based on their experimentation, work hard to accommodate rather than block innovation. This may mean going to bat with “higher-ups” to gain permission, or to allow the experimentation to fly “under the radar” until you can make a case for the value of the changes.
• Encourage the fringies – the people who push the limits of a tool. Make them allies rather than enemies. Their pushing of your buttons may also create the innovation that you need to foster wider adoption.

What are your suggestions for technology stewardship that involved unexpected uses?

And… you never know where a link will lead you either.

Photo credit: Alex Osterwalder on Flickr

Cross posted from Nancy’s Blog

A couple of people have asked me for more materials related to the Community Orientations Spidergram activity. I have embedded them into some slides now up … Digital Habitats Community Orientation Spidergram Activity.

Here is a hint I should have shared earlier. The “context” orientation is a bit odd on the spidergram. You need to decide if internal orientation is in the middle/exterior towards the outside or reversed. I tend to use internal towards the middle, but I realized my instructions weren’t so clear.

Another way to do it is to ignore the “context” spoke from an internal/external perspective and then do one layer on the spidergram around your internally focused activities. Then with a different color, do another layer on externally focused activities. I’ve done this with a few test cases and it quickly showed that some communities which have both internal and external contexts have very different internal and external activities.

Tags: spidergram

(Crossposted from my Full Circle blog)

My friend Sue Wolff generously lent me two books recently. The first, Marie Winn’s “Red-Tails in Love” captured my heart and mind. It is the story of a community of birdwatchers in Central Park in New York City and how they observed, loved and obsessed over a family of Red-Tailed Hawks that raised a family on an apartment ledge just of Central Park.

If you have ever hankered to read a “real life” story about an organic community of practice, one free from the business pressures of CoPs manufactured inside of corporations, read this book. The narrative is compelling, but the lessons about community life are at once simple, effective and profound.

I thought it might be fun to look at this community, as best an outsider can do (which is usually not very well) from one of the CoP perspectives Etienne Wenger, John Smith and I use in our upcoming book, Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for community. This work builds on what Etienne has been doing for years. 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. By looking at orientations, we posit, you are in a better position to understand how to support them with tools and processes. They give you a lens to reflect on how your community is doing and where you might want it to be headed.

Here is a brief glimpse of the orientations:

• 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.)

Spidergram examples of the Central Park Birdwatchers - click for larger image

We have been using a little “spidergram” as an assessment tool, again building on Etienne’s work, but each of us has been creative in how we use it. Sometimes it is for looking at technology choices (like in the Digital Habitats book), sometimes for community assessment and planning. So I decided to see what orientations were strong in the Central Park birdwatchers “Regulars” group chronicled in the book. Here is the image I came up with:

Would you like to try the Spidergram activity for your community? You can find a little cheat sheet and template here.

If you try it, I’d be interested to hear what you observed or learned about your community by doing this exercise.

And yes, the book is coming SOON!

Tags: birds, Marie Winn, New York City

Our friend Shawn Callahan has been following the work on the book – for years! He has been privy to various drafts and has recently been using the Community Orientations in his work with communities.

Recently he realized he wasn’t so clear on orientations 7, 8 and 9 so this past weekend we hooked up on Skype and talked through them. Here is Shawn’s post and the podcast.

As we talked, I was interested to hear about the exercise he did with the orientations, and see how it compared to how I’ve been using them. Here is what Shawn wrote:

BTW the community orientation exercise simply involved getting the participants of the workshop to plot on a radar chart, which I’d drawn on a whiteboard, where they thought the community was currently and then do this again for where they would like to see the community of 12 months time. It generated a terrific conversation and a feel of mutual purpose. Here is what the result looked like.

I had not thought about using the orientations for community plans or aspirations. I had been using them as a diagnostic for technology stewards to a) become aware of key community orientations and b) then use that to plan or tweak the community’s technology configuration. But both make a lot of sense to me!

Thanks, Shawn

Nancy

Ward Cunningham just recently set up his own channel on YouTube and has edited a conversation we had last Fall. His philosophy for conducting interviews is simple and effective: make guests feel comfortable and ask them questions that make them look good. He did a great job making me feel comfortable.

We start by talking about how, in writing the book, we tried to not “just” be experts, but to also get at our experience and the more intimate level at which communities live. At the very end I remember to tell him that his interaction with the community that formed on his wiki was one of the first instances where I glimpsed what the role of a technology steward might be about. It has taken a lot of work to write about “less technical” people might take on the role, but I’m convinced that you don’t have to be a Ward Cunningham to serve your community with respect to its technology needs.

Tags: technologystewardship

As we wend our way down the path to final publication of the book, friends have asked us to share some of the bits and pieces that we have been using in our work and workshops. One of those is the Reader’s Guide and Action Notebook. This is now chapter 10 in the book and it provides a set of checklists to guide a technology stewards through some of the central tasks of community technology stewardship. We are making the document available here on the website both as a contribution to tech stewards everywhere, and to make it easy for book readers to download a copy to work on without writing all over their books. I like to write in my books, but I know not everyone does. 

If you use the Notebook, leave a note here with how it does or does not work for you.  We realize some of the material may not make sense without the context of the book.  But we also know it can always be improved. So your comment may contribute towards future iterations!

Flickr CC Image Credit:  wenxin

Tags: Action_Notebook

January 1st, 2009 has been the target publication date for the book for a while, but that now seems to be slipping.  We’re working as hard as we can on type faces and layout details and all of that.  At the same time we’re using chapters of the book in a CPsquare workshop called “Connected Futures.”  The discussion with workshop participants last Monday convinced us that the separate and occasional problems we’ve had talking about the polarities in this slide really needed to be addressed:

So Chapter 5 is getting a quick rewrite to talk more carefully about the togetherness / separation and reification / participation polarities.  We hope the rewrite won’t affect the final publication date, but it’s an example of the complications and risks on the way to press.

Coincidentally, I’m reading a thesis from CPsquare’s research and dissertation fest titled “A system that Works for Me – an anthropological analysis of computer hackers’ shared use and development of the Ubuntu Linux system” by Andreas Lloyd.  He gives a precise and insightful observations of how a community of practice deals with the polarities through their technologies and their relationships at the same time. Referencing the thesis or discussing it is out of scope because that would delay publication!  But Lloyd’s work is a good reminder that seeking to be precise about the polarities in Chapter 5 is really worth the risk of taking extra time. The following extended quote starts on page 55:

The Jargon File describes how the importance of not being interrupted is deeply engrained in hacker etiquette:

… if someone appears at your door, it is perfectly okay to hold up a hand (without turning one’s eyes away from the screen) to avoid being interrupted. One may read, type, and interact with the computer for quite some time before further acknowledging the other’s presence (of course, he or she is reciprocally free to leave without a word). The understanding is that you might be in hack mode with a lot of delicate state in your head, and you dare not swap that context out until you have reached a good point to pause.

I experienced this several times in my visits and interviews with Ubuntu hackers, whose partners and friends over time have come to allow room for and be forgiving of these programming­ related eccentricities. In turn, the hackers themselves often take care to balance their time on the computer in relation to their family’s needs, when they reach one of those “good points to pause.” I have found that this duality is also very characteristic for the way that hackers interact with each other on­line where you can’t assume that people are communicative at any given moment. As Ellen Ullman points out, this inability to be interrupted makes hackers somewhat asynchronous to one another – at least in the short term (Ullman 1995:132). This is reflected clearly by the fact that all of the Ubuntu hackers’ preferred on­line communicative means are textual and thus – at least to some extent – asynchronous. Email, newsgroups and web forums postings and bug tracker comments are all based on users reading and replying asynchronously. Even real time communications such as IRC chat channels and Instant Messaging bend to this rule as developers “ping” each other, and if there’s no immediate response, they can ask their question and let the other answer when he has time or attention to spare:

…
09:00	carlos	pitti: ping
[...]
09:07	pitti	carlos: pong
09:08	carlos	pitti: I did a mistake yesterday night and latest Edgy export has the plural form bug (bug #2322)
09:08	Ubugtu	Malone bug 2322 in rosetta “Truncated plural forms” [Critical,In progress] http://launchpad.net/bugs/2322
09:09	carlos	pitti: I’m exporting a new version with that fixed, but it would take around 23 hours
09:09	carlos	am I late to have it in the prerelease version?
09:09	pitti	carlos: ah, then I’ll rebuild the edgy packs this afternoon
09:09	pitti	carlos: it won’t go into RC anyway
09:09	carlos	ok
09:09	pitti	carlos: the plan is to upload the final packs tomorrow
09:10	pitti	carlos: thus I’d like to have today’s in perfect shape
09:10	carlos	I see
09:10	carlos	ok
09:10	carlos	pitti: I will ping you when the new version is available

Here, Carlos needs to notify Pitti of a new bug which he needs to take into consideration when building a group of packages for upload. Since Pitti is busy, the conversation doesn’t continue until Pitti is able to respond and they can coordinate their work. Most of the Ubuntu hackers’ day-to-day interaction takes place on IRC where they can pick up on interesting discussions and be available if someone needs to ask a question. The hackers deftly navigate back and forth between conversations, fluidly participating as the IRC client automatically notifies them when someone “pings” them or even just mentions their online moniker. And even if they miss something, they can always go back to check the chat logs or mail archives as all interactions within the community are recorded and publically archived online. At times, IRC is such an easy and non-intrusive way of quick communication that it supersedes conversation even when developers are in the same room. Mark Shuttleworth enjoys relating the story of how he went out to buy beer during one of the first gatherings of the core Ubuntu developers at his London flat. When he came back he found 18 hackers sitting in his living room, working in silence, exchanging textual information on IRC. [20] This anecdote illustrates how the work environment provided by the system takes precedence over face-to-face discussions simply to avoid breaking the flow state afforded by the computer. [21]

[20] I saw the same trend again and again at conferences, one time even witnessing two hackers quietly sitting in opposite ends of a conference room, having a furious argument on IRC about who should be responsible for fixing a troublesome piece of software, and it didn’t end until one of them looked up and saw the other hacker sitting at the far end of room and contentiously shouted: “Stop being such an arsehole!”

[21] This asynchronous sociality is not only a norm well suited to hackers’ mode of collaboration, but it is at times also a necessity as the Ubuntu hackers are spread across the multiple time zones, mostly in North America, Europe and Australia, making exchanges such as this common:

15:56	mdz	good evening
15:57	zul	afternoon
15:58	ajmitch	morning
15:58	mdz	good UTEvening

It is easy to forget that the Ubuntu community spans the entire globe, since it mostly becomes an issue when it comes to finding IRC meeting hours that fit all members of the community, and meetings typically rotate between being early morning, late afternoon, or late evening to accommodate as many time zones as possible.

Funny how you don’t update mental statistics like, “how long have you been working on the book?”  I’ve been answering the question with “three years” for a long time.  But actually we started working on the project in January 2003, so that makes it four and a half years.

During our meeting yesterday afternoon I was struck by how different the three of us are in our preferences and tastes when it comes to things like fonts, graphic images, and book design.  When you consider how we came to agreement on so many things when it comes to the content of our book, all those differences make me really appreciate the agreements that we forged during those four and a half years of collaboration

We’re working on a book title.  So the end of the project is nigh!