For those not familiar with the Well, it is one of the original and most enduring online communities. (Nancy hosts the Virtual Communities conference there with Jon Lebkowsky!)

Inkwell is a great example of a “public facing space” for a private communities which is reflected in Digital Habitats chapter six as the “context” orientation. It gives outsiders a taste of the Well, which may invite them in, and it gives the Well a way to add value out to the world. Plus a few Well member volunteers get free review copies and encouragement to help stimulate the conversation, along with one or two designated conversation hosts. There have been some amazing conversations in Inkwell over the years, and it is now a Well tradition.

In preparation for the two weeks, the three of us thought it might be fun to record a short conversation to introduce ourselves. This is not what usually happens on Inkwell.vue, so we’ll see how it goes.

• Etienne, Nancy and John interview each other

Some of the questions we raised and which might be fodder for the Inkwell conversation include:

• Do you recognize yourself as a technology steward?
• And if you recognize yourself in the role, does it make a difference in practice?  Are there consequences in terms of relationships, labels, or intentions that change as a result?
• In your community do you see the tech steward  role as more individual or more distributed across community members?  What are the consequences?
• What can we learn from long-lived communities like The Well?
• How do technology stewardship practices vary across different socialcontexts?

From my perspective we wrote Digital Habitats as a call to action (and reflection) more than anything else. So it’s a bit ironic to see it used as a textbook, at least for me, being so skeptical about exactly what kind of learning is going on in schools. But actually it’s pretty cool. Of course it make me wonder exactly how it’s used? What kinds of conversations result from its use? And: beyond schools or its use as a textbook, I always am curious: how do people use it, if they do? Is it helpful? In what way?

The short answer is: you can never really know. Why? Using our Digital Habitats jargon, it is because participation trumps reification. Here’s one heavy duty answer as to why by Lucy Suchman on p 110 in Orr (1996):

Indexicality of instructions means that an instruction’s significance with respect to actions does not inhere in the instructions, but must be found by the instruction follower with reference to the situation of its use. (Suchman 1987, p .61)

Which amounts to saying that the context of use and the situation where conversations occur matter a lot. (An aside: is Digital Habitats is a set of instructions? Not in any simple way. A call to action, yes. But you have to decide on the actions!)

Anyway, it’s interesting to see a field trip happening in plain sight. A few weeks ago, Kathy Milhauser’s class at City University of Seattle came here for a field trip. A Wordle summary gives a glimpse of the discussion.

The following week they had a conversation “back home” on Blackboard. Kathy provided a nice summary of the discussion.

A couple weeks later I was invited to talk at the opening of the second day of Pepperdine University’s Cadre 12 Action Research Conference of their Master of Arts in Learning Technology because several students had used Digital Habitats as a textbook. Kathy Milhauser graduated from one of Pepperdine’s technology programs and as Margaret Riel pointed out during the session, Pepperdine has made a very systematic effort to bust out of the sequestered classroom model. The event was a wonderful effort to allow people to participate at a distance. I would have liked to be there but appreciated being able to be there at all. Nice to see familiar names.

I have to confess though that I multi-tasked off and on during the morning after my talk. The video stream let me listen in. I heard someone say, “Digital Habitats as become my bible.” I heard Scott Mortensen say “After reading Digital Habitats and everything clicked for me, then I ….” Wow! (Here’s a glimpse of Mortensen’s thinking.) In keeping with the biblical theme, Babette Novak reported that she asked herself:

W W E W D?

Translation “What would Etienne Wenger Do?”

Later on I hear Michael Cramer (an IT executive ) tell a story about people brought together into a company through a merger or acquisition process who recognized each other through story telling. One of the snippets was about how many people had been seen sprinkling a loved one’s ashes from the top of a Ferris Wheel because somehow that was where the deceased’s heart was.

Problems of indexicality aside, all this work with our book made one heart in Portland, Oregon feel very warm.

Reference: Julian E. Orr, Talking About Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job (Ithaca, NY: Ilr Press/Cornell University Press, 1996)

One of the great things about the sustained connections we make through CPsquare is that when you bump into people in other settings there’s such a strong connection. There are common interests, common vocabulary, and an extraordinary willingness to share insights. Last week during the Yi-Tan Tech Call 274: on Digital Habitats, I noticed LaDonna Coy tweeting about it. Afterward I wrote here, asking:

I’ve seen your tweets off and on and wondered what you’re up to and was really excited to see that you were on the Yi-Tan call.

How was it? What was surprising? I was wondering if you’d be up for sharing some reactions & thoughts — possibly even on the CPsquare blog.

Here is LaDonna’s response:

Hi John,

I’ve got a colleague I work with (Ken Homer) out in CA and he has encouraged me to join in on the Yi-Tan calls for some time — when I saw it was you, Etienne and Nancy engaging in a convo about the new book — I just knew the time had come for me to be there. Now that I’ve had the experience I’m wondering how I can fit the call in more often? If we don’t get a respectable outcome with our CoPs work, I may have significant free time on my hands, sigh.

Surprising, provocative, intriguing — very much so. Here’s my takeaways..

• Considering the important truth that no matter what tech we choose (or don’t choose) we include some, exclude others. Not an easy space to stand in.

• thinking about Nancy’s statement, “technology is designed for group but experienced by the individual” .. pondering .. she’s given voice to my wiki experience.

• Challenge of navigating and negotiating the spaces with broad continuum of experience, knowledge and skills. What a challenge it is even when some are adept with the the tech while others remain timid or right-down resistant. Not so much critical mass but critical intention.

• What if tech development were guided by tech steward rather than IT peeps? (great question, huge wish, especially in state gov where all things are Sharepoint. Wrestling with how to make Sharepoint do what the groups//community need it to do, sigh.

• Tools in “tech stone age” … not so sure, maybe bronze age … at least I don’t have to know and be able to write code to engage my colleagues – I remember when it was that way, when one had to be 90% geek not 10%. Now, 10% geek will do in most cases.

• Difference in perspective between “what can we make/do with these [tools, platform]” versus what do we need the [tool, platform] to do for us? One feels resigned, adaptive to what exists while the other creative challenge for what could be.

Seeding?
What we didn’t talk about is something I’m facing and wrestling with still. Seeding (where there is little or no real community) and supporting engagement in our withering attempt to engage community sectors online. The Provider Network is doing a bit better but not by much. Thinking about why — conditions, capacity, attitudes, and what we are learning mixed with disappointment.

Measurement? (still)
I’ve also been thinking a lot about measurement, and what I think of as the core about what CoPs are about about. Seems the main thing about online community is 1) relationships and engagement... wondering how to measure, has anyone actually done it … so went looking for tools and resources — found two instruments that measure relationships that I’m thinking of tinkering with and using with my group in KS (want to tinker?). Grunig-Hon here and in Katie’s book, Measuring Public Relationships and attached paper and instrument from Vern Larsen’s work on collaboration (research shows quality of collaboration has a direct impact on the quality of the outcomes).

Not sure this is what were looking for or whether appropriate for the blog – but if it fits, point me that away I’d be happy to share and learn with everyone.

LaDonna

• How has technology changed what it means for communities to “be together”?
• What is the role of a technology steward? the key skills? the new terms of art?
• Where can we see these stewards in action? How can we learn these skills?

Theme: Rethinking Ourselves (KM People)  as Technology Stewards

The agenda:

• What brought Etienne, John and Nancy to the conversation about technology stewardship
• A little bit about our respective practices
• Just in case Images: A slide deck with:
  • A definition of technology stewardship
  • Orientations
  • Polarities
• Open up the conversation

Resources:

Book site: http://www.technologyforcommunities.com

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/smithjd/digital-habitats-sikm-presentation

A Peek at the public back-channel: The SIKM chat in Etherpad and Twitter

To prepare for today’s call we decided to just start with what brought us to this work, since reporting on work that has spanned almost 6 years seemed a bit daunting.

Etienne Wenger: what brought me to this tech steward work?  The 2001 “Tech Report” for the Federal Council of CIOs was getting out of date.  proposed to write an update of it.  But the more we talked, the more we focused on the role of the people who are bridging between communities and technology.

John Smith: Years ago, started noticing how, in CPsquare (http://cpsquare.org) and in other communities, people straddled different tools and technologies, like phones and Twitter or forums and face-to-face. They were frequently going back and forth between one and the other. Often without a lot of obvious cues as to why one was chosen, or why it fit. It was just “understood” where the conversation would be picked up. That seemed like a real indicator that some useful activity going on there that was worth understanding and cultivating, because it helped keep those conversations going in those communities.

Nancy White: how could I say no? it’s an individual invitation from people I like.  IN the beginning I thought it was about technology.  In the end I realized  that it’s about “making things visible” .  I realize that this morning.  Tech stewardship is helping make something visible when it’s important, useful.  an act of bridging between tech & people.  That was echoed over last several weeks several times, so it changed what I was thinking of saying today.    When people invite me to talk about KM, I say that I don’t believe it knowledge can be managed.  It’s all about making knowledge visible enough to make it handle-able.

Etienne Wenger: giving something a name is important.  It supports social learning.  Since social learning happens everywhere, giving things names is central. It helps people talk about what they want.  In fact, naming “communities of practice” and any given community of practice in particular is useful because it makes things visible, helps people talk about what they want.  The concept of “community of practice” has had a career because it makes social learning as a concept accessible.  If communities of practice make social learning visible, then some people think that technology is a way to make them visible. Tech stewardship seems important today because communities are jumping across technologies.  Someone has to care about tech in the name of the community – and that’s technology stewardship

We worked with client who had worked so hard to make a place on their intranet for their CoPs. But for us it became apparent that the platform was just not usable. We blew their minds by bringing in other technologies that were not part of their platform.  There are very few communities that are confined to a single platform

Nancy White: Tech stewardship is so complex, difficult and subtle because there are so many tools and it’s so easy to find exceptions to most rules.  It’s easy to find many different ways of using any given tool.

Patti Anklam: I think the complexity of the job also has a lot to do with the fact that the steward is constantly interacting in the context of human relationships.

Etienne Wenger: that makes the function of tech stewardship so important.

Nancy White: what if there is no “community”?  Look at groups on twitter, like the one at “kmchat” that gathers around a hashtag.  They get together for an hour each week.  I know it took a while to gather around a question, to get someone to facilitate it.  But the platform has enabled a new kind of conversation.  The tag is something that people follow.  It’s interesting how technology has blurred the lines around conversations.  It raises the question about what is a community.

Etienne Wenger: The idea of a technology steward is to support a community-centric focus rather than a platform-centric one.

John Smith: It used to be that the conversation about technologies for communities focused on web forums and email lists, which are platforms with sharp boundaries. (Or at least on those platforms the cross-community blurring just wasn’t so visible.) That has changed.  We now have many platforms for interaction where the boundaries between communities are more obviously blurred.

Nancy White: in the past we conceptualized communities as people who aggregated around people.  Have had that assumption and belief challenged when people are attracted by and gather around content.  Trust forms around “interesting content”, and “let’s make friends” comes after that.

Etienne Wenger: it’s always been that people connect for lots of different reasons.  reading a book, interest in a novel (?).  The web has made an explosion of alternatives.  Yes… and, the attractor factor is emphasized now, and our past social process models were heavily relationship centric. (I.e. trust models)

Peter West: With so many technologies in use, how do you 1) *merge* the threads of conversations/interactions and facilitate the broadest access to the *nuggets* that emerge and facilitate the greatest opportunities for impact? 2) capture the material in an intelligible archive?

John Smith: First you have to do it manually. You can only do that when you are an insider. You know the different places where people are gathering. Then you weave it and connect it. Eventually some of it can be automated.   Brings out the idea that tech stewardship has different phases or levels of activity. At one level maybe as technology stewards we’re helping plan the selection and use of new tool/platform. But at the ground level we’re trouble-shooting, debugging, spreading the word about the use of a tool. Just because a tool is there to be used doesn’t mean people know how to use it.  It includes the level at which Nancy and John negotiate how we to take notes in Etherpad during this call – at the bottom or the top. (“Or the middle!” says Nancy) That is the spectrum of tech stewardship but the metric for effort and success is always sense making. Are we learning together?

Peter West:  Tech illiteracy may put certain members at a disadvantage.

Etienne Wenger: This is where TS is a form of community leadership as well. It includes that kind of awareness. A tech steward has to also be aware that technology itself can be a source of boundary – by excluding some people. Tech stewards have to be aware of the new conversations that tech enables, but also of the way that it can create divisions and separation. It’s a form of caring for social learning. It always cuts both ways.

Nancy White: tolerance for ambiguity (a value that comes from online facilitation) applies to tech stewardship, as well.  We assume that if a tech applies or works for me, it must work for you.  It’s hard to get around that assumption Even when technologies are designed for a group, they are always experienced individually.  In a face-to-face setting we can see when people are “out” but that’s much harder in a tech mediated environment.  So we can’t really assume we know what’s going on.  That’s the job we’re doing when we say: “we haven’t heard from you, what’s going on?”  There are many possible answers: Internet access is down, I don’t know how to use it, I’m feeling left out by the conversation, etc.

Patti Anklam: what is the relationship between the TS and a community facilitator?

Nancy White: facilitators find themselves as TS’s. they are accidental technology stewards.

Etienne Wenger: We need crossover from both ends to happen.  to the extent that tech and communities are influencing each other, it’s important for facilitators to think like tech stewards but it’s also important for tech stewards to think like facilitators.

All: tech & communication converge and then diverge one after another. “which community are you speaking for?”  roles as a way of making things visible.

Etienne Wenger: it used to be that the IT department was the one that introduced technology.  Now many members introduce tools.  that distributes the community facilitation process.

Susan (?): how do you handle it when people want to know exactly how to use the tool?  In advance.  There are limits as to how much time I can spend explaining it.

Patti Anklam: I’m working with a client now.  serving as a TS. they are asking “how do we use this tool?” I  talk about the tool a bit at each staff meeting.

All: Taking a developmental approach – the path to tool usage as important as destination. There’s always more to learn, so best not to try to front-load all the learning.  And things change over time.

John Smith: If you think of regular face-to-face conversations such as staff meetings as platforms for “next tool to be adopted” – then after some time maybe another technology than face-to-face can be the platform for the tool after that. There’s a process for building one layer on top of another. The more reliable older, familiar tools are as a platform for what is being experimented with, the better. For thinking about these things, it’s useful to use the polarities that we discuss in the book. They can be challenging at first, but once you have mastered them, they are a platform for handling tool adoption.

Nancy White: talking about polarities — in slide # 7.  The polarities embody many of the issues we’re talking about.  If we think of a developmental path for tools rather than an on-off switch.  I like Chris Collison et al.’s model of technology adoptions: starts with awareness and eventually leads to “that’s just the way we do it.”  People want to jump from one to another with no pain, no intermediate learning, playing, experiments.  It’s more effective to say, “Let’s do a lot of little experiments”.

Etienne Wenger: I see two different paths into tool adoption.  one is the sandbox path (playing with the tool in a no pressure environment).  The other is an activity-directed path.  where the tool makes an activity possible. (Nancy agrees. heee hee)  [John does, too  :]

John Smith: Peter West’s questions in the chat focuses us on what is NOT being said. That’s very sophisticated listening. TS involves a lot of planning, doing, and acting, but it is all based on listening. Listening for what is not being said, what can’t be said because of tools, or because of some people are excluded. Listening is the key activity. (Nancy nodding vigorously)

Thomas Blumer How to you balance best of breed products with enterprise standardized products?

Etienne Wenger: that’s a real tension for IT departments that they will have to answer. It’s always a tension.

Thomas Blumer: When we try to launch a discussion forum, people will say “we have this other tool that has this other important feature.”  That creates little pockets of people who are advocates for the use of different tools. From a KM point of view, the technology is less important than people knowing about each other. Isolated pockets of technology are less useful. But that’s what IT delivers -  especially in R&D organizations that are keen on technology. They will say, “We really need this feature.”

John Smith: The dynamic between an IT department and the organization it is supposed to serve deserves attention.  From the outside an IT department can look like a monolithic gatekeeper. But in my experience and observation within in IT there is diversity in terms of tastes, learning styles, history, generational preferences, technology styles, and advocacy for different ways of doing things. Part of the shift that TS can bring is to humanize, open up, and make available that diversity of experience and capacity that does exist within any given department – including the IT department.

Nancy White: building on the “features” point: when we were first working on the book, we were looking at “feature shoot-out” comparisons.  We realized there was a great deal of diversity around features and even around the awareness of features.   That led us to think about how tech stewards need to focus on understanding the practice of using a tool more than on discrete features.

Etienne Wenger: Diff communities have different configurations of tools and platforms.  To keep building on Thomas’ question, the issue is not so much standardization of tools and platforms as it is of integration. How do we integrate the tools and platforms that one community uses (or integrate the outputs that are generated)?  How do we make it all searchable? We have more and more technologies to create connections like a Twitter feed – that can connect things happening in different places. Integration is not just standardization. It’s a human practice as well as a process of technological integration.

John Smith: Although you can’t really automate “listening for exclusion” we can get better at it as we gain experience.  And it’s really important.  We gain experience as we listen to what is being said, in paying attention to small details like note taking. It’s important to ask, “What am I missing?” That’s important to think about individually and  collectively, for ourselves and for others. What are they missing that they need to participate in?

Etienne Wenger: Tech can create exclusion. This idea of integration is not just a matter of connecting to APIs.  It involves looking more deeply at how technology creates exclusion and inclusion and working from there.

John (caller): How and when to integrate across conversations and tools has to include focus on business intent.  How does this work support achieving business objectives in a quantifiable manner?

John Smith: The way we’ve been talking about that issue has been to ask whether and how a tech steward is “serving the conversation.” Does the conversation serve the business is an important question. You can’t answer it unless the conversation exists with some integrity.

Etienne Wenger: We are facing an evolution here.  It’s difficult for organizations to enter this space without having some level of trust that the participants are actually caring about the business of the organization.

John (caller): That is the starting point: business intent, strategic imperatives. Then how can KM help achieve that?

Etienne Wenger: In a K based organization you cannot pursue that unless the people you are working with also are pursing that. It is the way they engage with each other. Can’t do this in a top down manner any more. People have to carry this.

John (caller): Yes, and how can we help them do that easier, better, cheaper, faster.

We are going to “interview” each other to save from falling into talking AT instead of talking WITH, but we have a few slides with definitions and URLs to pull out as needed. We’ll also be playing with Twitter using the #SIKM tag. As a back up, we also have an Etherpad because John and I like having a back channel!

Face-to-face conferences aren’t what they used to be and that’s ok with me. How many times have you gone to a face-to-face conference in another city where you rub shoulders with a lot of strangers, listen to a bunch of talking heads with obscure PowerPoint slides in cold dark rooms, make a few acquaintances at the reception, give your talk to a group that may or may not get what you’re talking about, and come home with a printed proceedings that goes on the bookshelf?

My days of passive participation are over and done with:

• For me, the reason to go to a big conference is the small group conversations with people I already know somewhat or with whom I share a common interest
• We have the tools to coordinate and connect before, during and after the event — to keep the conversation going (it starts before the conference and goes afterward as well)

I always want to know who else is attending an event, what they’re thinking about, where people are staying, and where we’re going to eat. During the conference, it’s useful to eavesdrop on parallel sessions that I’m missing by watching the twitter stream. And it’s helpful to be able to look at people’s slides right away, and to find related materials that’s mentioned or written during the conference. And it’s nice to see photos of the event afterward, too.

Tagging before, during and after a conference is a key tool for using a big conference as a kind of host system a smaller group that wants to connect. The economics of face-to-face meetings leads to big conferences. The economics of meaning-making require smaller, but not closed, conversations.  A little technology stewardship on behalf of your small group comes to the rescue!

Apart from email, forums, teleconferences, mobile phones, and other technologies, tagging is useful for enabling a small group to use a large conference as a platform for its own purposes. It’s an example of a technology that allows the integration across tools by means of a practice and a protocol (as we discuss in Chapter 4 of Digital Habitats).

Using CPsquare’s “sidecar” participation in the AoIR Conference (which coincided with the EPIC conference) as an example, here are some observations of how tagging can play a role in supporting a subgroup’s participation at a big conference.

• Emergent intention. Early on nobody knows for sure who will be there and therefore whether it’s worth going. Email discussions about who’s going are key to establishing that there will be some kind of quorum which would make a long trip worthwhile. But at a certain point, tagging the resources that emerge is essential. Four months after tagging the AoIR conference, for example, we noticed that the EPIC conference was scheduled the same week. That coincidence turned out to be a key to the dynamics of the conversation.
• Fuzzy social boundaries. Tagging is open in the sense that anybody can use it and it’s visible to everyone. Tagging prospective participants or presentations is a way of encouraging participation. Looking at the tagstream, for example, you can see that Sus Nyrop, who did participate, was hoping that Christina Costa would join us (although she couldn’t make it in the end).
• Identification of relevant resources . Being together at a conference may focus on a particular topic, but you have to identify a lot of other relevant resources like where to stay. We used the lodging page from a previous conference in Copenhagen to figure out where our group might stay.
• Multiple outputs. Active participation generates a lot of different outputs. Tagging is the ideal way to keep track of them. Delicious links are here. Flickr photos are here. Not much video produced at that conference.
• Distributed leadership. Although I used the “cp2oir08” tag more than anybody else, others used it as well. The goal is to coax people to contribute, whether it’s a tag you came up with or not.

Tips

• Propose a tag early. Announce it by email or by other means to get the word out.
• Tag should be as intuitive and descriptive as it can be but as short as possible.
• Weave tagging into group practice and tagged resources into the conversation. Mention what’s been tagged by you or what you’ve found in the tagstream that others should know about.
• Think of the tagstream a community-building resource. A tagstream is the accumulation of tagged materials contributed by everyone, which is stored on a tagging platform such as delicious, and which retrieved or monitored via an RSS feed (but which can also be viewed as a web page).
• Identify related or parallel tags (such as “ir9” that was used for the AoIR conference as a whole on Flickr, delicious, and Twitter).
• Think of the tagstream as an ideal research tool, when you’re going back to figure out what happened or when.

Photo by Bev Trayner.

Below is a location by location, chronological listing of the events I’m involved in during my trip. There are links for more information and registration. I’ve highlighted the “Digital Habitats” stuff. You may notice there are some openings if you want to propose something!

Sydney

November 9th

9-12 am – Stewarding Technology for Communities

This workshop will directly come from the book! There are still a few places left. Join us!

1-4pm – Introduction to Graphic Facililtation

6-9pm – Sydney Facilitator’s Network Evening Tweetup – Drawing on Walls

November 10th

9-12:30 – Introduction to Online Communities

1:30 – 4:30 pm – Advanced Online Communities

This workshop will use the Spidergram and Polarities work from the book.

November 11th

Open in the morning.  Want to do something?

Transit to Canberra via train in the afternoon

Canberra

November 12th

Private workshop 1-3pm
Transit to Adelaide 5:30 pm

Adelaide

November 13th

E-Dayz Conference Keynote “Why should we “do” community (or why not) for learning?” (9:20 am as part of larger 3 day event!)

November 14th

Play day in Adelaide!

Melbourne

November 15th

Transit to Melbourne

November 16th

Private events in the morning and afternoon.

6 – 8 pm KMLF Public Event – This will touch on Digital Habitats!
RMIT Graduate School of Business, 300 Queen Street. Melbourne, Lecture room 158.1.2B (Ground level – just behind reception).
Ample metered street parking nearby in Queen Street (between La Trobe and Little Lonsdale). RSVP: by email to melbournekmlf@gmail.com

November 17th

8:45-12:00 Introduction to Online Communities

1:00 – 4:00 pm Advanced Online Communities

This workshop will use the Spidergram and Polarities work from the book.

Evening transit to Mooloolaba

Mooloolaba

November 18th

1 – 4:30 pm Stewarding Technology for Communities

This workshop will directly come from the book! There are still a few places left. Join us!

November 19th

Keynote at Learning Technologies Conference (Which WILL involve Digital Habitats!)

November 20-22

Play days

November 23

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