Stewarding Technology for Communities

Reader’s Guide and Action Notebook

This is a reprint of chapter 4. The printable file is also attached to this post.

This chapter provides a brief overview of the rest of the book. It has two purposes. It is a general reader’s guide—enabling you to focus and skip through the book according to your needs. It is also a “Technology Steward’s Action Notebook.” It offers you key questions about what each chapter may mean in practice for you and your community.

As an action notebook, this entire chapter is available for downloading at http://technologyforcommunities.com/index.php/actionnotebook so you can print it out, write on it, and use it to bookmark your way through the book. It is where the ideas in the book connect with the reality of your community and your practice. After you work through the notebook, you may wish to share it with your community and with other technology stewards to get additional feedback and perspectives.

Part I – Introduction
Chapters 1-4

The first three chapters clarified our perspective on communities by analyzing an example, by retracing the recent history of mutual influence between communities and technologies, and by introducing the notion of technology stewardship as an emergent form of leadership in communities.

Part II – Literacy
Chapters 5-7

Chapters 5-7 offer models for thinking about technology stewardship in communities—a kind of “literacy” of the function.

Chapter 5 : From Features to Community Configuration

Technology stewardship is concerned with all the tools and features at a community’s disposal—and how they all fit together. After you read this chapter, you may want to inventory and analyze your community’s current configuration.

• Get the big picture. Make a list of all the platforms and tools your community uses. Identify which are dominant, which are used by smaller groups and individuals. Make a note of which community activities the tools support. You might want to set up a table as shown in the chapter.
• Identify the key features of community tools. Are some of these features commonly or rarely used? What are the reasons for that?
• Assess actual tool use. How aware is your community about its configuration? Is it useful to set aside a small amount of time to talk about this without distracting the community from its main interests? You may gain greater insights about what people do and do not use or want.

Chapter 6 : Scanning the marketplace

You can use these polarities to assess and manage your community’s technology. Some communities intentionally exist firmly at one end or the other of each polarity. Others need to keep an eye on the effects of tools and adjust things, a bit like a slider between the ends of each polarity: when is the configuration of tools excessively slanted toward togetherness in time, toward publishing, or toward group process, and what should be done to redress the balance? Here are some questions that might stimulate your thinking about the polarities and help guide your subsequent technology decisions.

Chapter 7 : Community Orientations

As you read the chapter, put a check by each of the nine orientations that you think describe your community.

Orientation 1: Meetings

Variants:

· Face-to-face or blended

· Online synchronous

· Online asynchronous

Orientation 2: Open-ended Conversation

Variants:

· Single-stream discussions

· Multi-topic conversation systems

· Distributed, sustained conversation

Orientation 3: Projects

Variants:

· Practice groups

· Project teams

· Instruction

Orientation 4: Content

Variants:

· Library

· Structured self-publishing

· Open self-publishing

· Content integration

Orientation 5: Access to Expertise

Variants:

· Access via questions and requests

· Direct access to explicitly designated experts

· Shared problem solving

· Knowledge validation

· Apprenticeship and mentoring

Orientation 6: Relationship

Variants:

· Connecting

· Knowing about people

· Interacting informally

Orientation 7: Individual Participation

Variants:

· Varying and selective participation

· Personalization

· Individual development

· Multimembership

Orientation 8: Community Cultivation

Variants:

· Democratic governance

· Strong core group

· Internal coordination

· External facilitation

Orientation 9: Service Context

Variants:

· Organization as context

· Cross-organizational context

· Constellation of related communities

· Public mission

After you have checked the relevant boxes, try to prioritize these orientations and understand how they show up in your community. You may then wish to revisit the tool/feature/activity grid you used for Chapter 5, as the orientations may help you see other activity patterns of your community. Chapter 5 suggested an inventory from the tool perspective. This chapter frames an inventory from the activity perspective. Together, both perspectives give you deeper insights into how you might steward your community’s technologies going forward. What do you notice about the match (or mismatch) between your dominant community orientations and the current configuration of tools? If yours is a new community, how might this information inform your technology acquisition choices?

Part III – Practice of Technology Stewarding
Chapters 8-10

Part III focuses on the evolving practice of stewarding technology in communities.

Chapter 8: Community Conditions and Characteristics

After you read Chapter 8, scan the following questions and answer those that seem important to your situation. You may very well need to consult your community to answer them.

§ Where is your community in its lifecycle? Where is it heading? Pick the appropriate state and note your conditions:

o Just forming, need basic tools to connect, but not sure from there.

Focus on assessing what tools members might bring in with them, on basic technology skill and on infrastructure.

o Growing and ready to add new functionality to its tool configuration.

Do you need to integrate into existing technologies? Are you considering a major change, such as a transition to a new platform?

o Stable, just needing some new tools.

Will you need to integrate into existing practices? How much disruption will the community tolerate?

§ How diverse is your community?

o How spread apart is it in terms of location and time zones?

o What language(s) do members speak? What other cultural or other diversity aspects may affect your technology choices?

§ What is your community’s technology interest and skills?

o Will new tools affect their work and community focus in a significant way?

o How interested is your community technology, and what is their capacity for learning new tools? What is the range of skills? If their interests and/or skills are diverse, could it cause conflict or distraction?

Environmental conditions

§ Is your community connected to one or more organizations?

o How embedded is your community in an organization? What impact does that have on your community?

o Who needs to be involved in technology decisions?

§ Does your community have a relationship with an IT department or others who need to take part in technology decisions?

o Do you need to develop your technical strategy in collaboration with the IT department?

o What technology resources or constraints are present with the IT department? Get these details in writing if you can.

§ How connected to the outside world is your community?

o How much do you want to control the boundaries of your community? Does the community need to be private and secure, or are open boundaries a key to the life of your community?

o How does your community need to interact with other communities? Do you need common tools for sharing and learning with them?

§ If you are an open community, how will you deal with spam?

Timing issues

· What is the current schedule or calendar for your community and how might you best fit a technology change into it? (In other words, are there times when “messing with technology” will cause a problem?)

· What external events or schedules do you need to take into consideration (budget cycles, holidays, availability of support, for example)?

Investment factors

§ Who could join the stewarding effort by offering resources—community sponsors, related organizations, members, other communities? Look for both financial, labor and in-kind resources. Don’t forget the power of voluntary contributions. They can build community.

o Are any conditions or expectations attached to those resources?

§ What is your financial strategy? Will you be buying and configuring software? Using hosted services? Do you have designated resources for carrying out technology stewarding or for providing other technical support?

o What are your short- and long-term goals and investment strategies? What are the must-haves for today, and what are longer-term needs that could be deferred?

§ What technical resources, internal or external, do you have access to? How can vendors help you? What working relationship do they offer? List these resources.

§ How much time do you have to devote as a technology steward? Who else can help?

Technology factors

§ What are your members’ technology constraints (for example, in terms of bandwidth, operating systems)?

§ How much time are members able to be or are customarily online and from where (office, home, field)? Some people have limited online time, or are able to be online only in specific locations. Others are always on. Very diverse situations can affect participation.

§ Look at all the existing or proposed “pieces” of your configuration. What level of integration and interoperability do you want?

§ What are the security, operating system, and compatibility requirements for your community? A firewall could spell disaster with some technology, preventing some members from having access to a tool. It may be an inescapable requirement in other settings.

§ Do you want a hosted (ASP) service, or will you host the software on your servers?

§ How much beta testing can you do or do you want to do? Can you test software from a vendor or in other communities using it?

Chapter 9: Technology Acquisition Strategies

Technology stewarding is most visible when it’s time to choose something. All of a sudden, people pay attention because decisions are being made, resources are being committed, and something is about to change in the community. What is your strategy for this very visible stage and how does it take into consideration all the things you know about your community (see the items from Chapter and the options you have in the marketplace? As you read through the chapter, check which strategy or strategies might work best for your community, noting any particular reasons for their use.

Strategy 1: Use what you have. Do you want to get up and running quickly but aren’t ready to invest in technology yet? Then consider this strategy of using what your members are already using in their daily lives/work such as email and the telephone.

· Do you know all you have at your disposal? Ask members and hosting organizations what they might let you use. If that is not enough, combine with strategy 2, using free platforms.

· Are there ways to repurpose an existing tool? What small adjustments could make these tools more useful to your community? Do knowledge or skill gaps in the community prevent an existing tool from serving the community fully?

Strategy 2: Use free platforms. Do you need something that works across organizations, and requires no money? Something easily accessible to a wide range of people? Then consider this strategy of using free, web-based tools.

· How important is control of your community data? If it is very important, make sure to pick options that allow you to back up your membership list, archives, and so on.

· Look for tools with active user communities. They usually can offer quicker support than the company providing tools to such large numbers of people.

Strategy 3: Build on an enterprise platform. Does your community live inside an organization with an existing IT infrastructure? If so, you might be able to configure some parts of that infrastructure to suit your community.

· Have you built relationships with people in the IT department and sought their support? They are a key to this strategy, and it is worth investing time in those relationships.

· Are other communities in your organization using the enterprise platform? If you want to do additional development or customization, it might be easier if you pooled resources.

Strategy 4: Deploy a community platform. Do you want one platform with a variety of tools and features all bundled together? Is that convenience critical to your community? If so, consider a community platform.

· Is the platform as good as it looks? As you shop for a community platform, make sure you can try it out. Get feedback from other communities that have used it, especially communities that show similarities in their orientations.

· Is the functionality what you need? Look carefully not only at the tools offered, but the features that make them useable.

Strategy 5: Build your own. Do you have deep technological knowledge in your community, or very unique, specific technical needs that are not met by tools in the marketplace? If the answer is yes, then your community may be ready to build its own platform.

· Define your needs first in terms of your community orientations and activities, then in terms of technological functionality. Work with your developers so they have clarity on the tools functionality you’re looking for.

· What are your long-term plans to support a custom-designed platform? Make sure more than one person knows the specifics of the system, so you are not stuck when a key member or a developer leaves the community.

Strategy 6: Use open-source software. Does your community wish to benefit and contribute to a larger network of people using the same software? Do you have a philosophical preference for free and open-source software? This may be a strategy, or a filter to evaluate software in any of the other strategies.

· Do you have the technical skills required to customize many of the current open-source offerings?

· Have you allocated some of your stewarding time to being involved with the open-source product’s user and developer community? This can be a rich source of knowledge and support, but it takes time as well.

Strategy 7: Patch pieces together. Are you interested in the emergent set of tools that quickly allow you to combine new functionality into basic tools like blogs and web pages? Do you like to do quick, low-cost experiments? The patch strategy may be right for your community.

· How will you test the functioning and usefulness of a new tool that you patch into the existing mix? How do you balance potential benefits with the cost to the community of dealing with new things or things that just “sort of work?” Balance innovation with the community’s attention and energy.

· Will the addition of pieces be done by many members of the community? How will that be negotiated?

Chapter 10: Stewarding Technology in Use

As you read this chapter, note where your stewarding is currently focused and where you might like to focus in the future. We have captured some of the key questions here, but this chapter has extensive tips and guidance that we have not reproduced in the action guide.

General principles

· Vision before technology: what is the vision of your community’s success? Place this above a list of technical specifications.

· Keep it simple: what is the simplest solution for your community at this point in time? Is that “good enough?”

· Let it evolve: as technology steward, how are you helping the community have a sense of its own community evolution?

· Use the knowledge around you: who can you tap to learn with and from?

· Always back it up: what is your data back-up plan?

Technology stewarding in the foreground

Major technology changes are about more than technology. They include change management. Are you at a moment of major technology changes, such as:

A major transition where you would be implementing or changing platforms?

Facing a community’s end-of-life status soon?

· Are you ready for the attention you might get when technology is in the foreground?

· Do you know enough about your community to know what it needs? Talk to as many people as you can. If you have to make a lot of assumptions, leave room to adjust as you move forward.

· What are your plans for a new technology implementation? What technologies are you looking at adding and who are your technology partners? How will you orient, train, and share good practices with your community?

· Community end-of-life situations have important technological implications. Pay particular attention to the preservation of community artifacts.

Technology stewarding in the background

Even when technology is not the focus, a number of tasks require attention. These include:

Supporting new members in their use of the community’s technology

· How many new members do you have per month? The more new members, the more resources you need to consider for on-boarding them on the community’s technologies.

Identifying and spreading good technology practices

· What practices has your community developed, especially ones that might be going unnoticed? Find and share them to increase the overall community’s ability to use technology.

Supporting community experimentation

· Is your community changing? Is it curious about new tools? Consider how you will support technology experimentation to meet these needs without disrupting the whole community.

Attending to community boundaries created by technology

· Tools create boundaries both by their nature (having to log in to more than one tool, for example) and by communities’ uses of them. Are individual preferences for one tool over another having an impact on your community? Are technical barriers preventing widespread adoption? Who can access what?

Assuring continuity across technology disruptions

· What are your practices for testing new tools? For system back up? Who has administrative permissions for tools? For making sure vendors get paid on time and domain registrations don’t lapse? Consider how to “keep the lights on” over time.

Part IV – Future
Chapters 11-12

The final chapters are two parts of an essay on the future of technology stewardship. While there are no specific action items for you as a steward, you may wish to use these chapters to begin defining what technology stewarding will look like in your community going forward.