Here’s a collection of news and tidbits from CPsquare: our workshop schedule, a CPsquare award, some Wiki goodies, and some highlights from the CPsquare conference on Religious and Spiritual communities.

The Foundations Workshop

The Foundations of Communities of Practice Workshop ^[1]  runs from Oct 24 to Dec 2.  We’re running late this fall due to a wedding ^[2].

First annual community development award to projects at Pepperdine University

With the support of Pepperdine University faculty members Margaret Riel and Paul Sparks, and the collaboration of Alice MacGillivray, Sue Wolff, and John David Smith, CPsquare is pleased to award Christian Borja and Noah Sparks, from Pepperdine’s MA in Learning Technology Program,  the

2011 CPsquare Award for Community Development through Action Research

This award is given to recognize skill and excellence in leveraging technology to support the formation, growth, and development of a community of practice through action research.  This award includes a membership in the CPsquare community and an invitation to present their work in the CPsquare Research and Dissertation series during the 2011-2012 year.

Accumulated (public) goodies on CPsquare’s Wiki

In the normal course of “business” at CPsquare, our Wiki grows and evolves.  Here are some pages in our public Wiki that have been updated because of conversations in CPsquare.

• http://cpsquare.org/wiki/Narrative_techniques ^[3] now has another “how to” reference because Shawn Callahan ^[4] was the “My Practice” person ^[5] in September
• We have accumulated a remarkable collection of articles about communities of practice in the healthcare ^[6] world and John Parboosingh and Jim Palmer added to the list in our most recent session of CPsquare’s R&D Series ^[7].
• (And the  resources related to Digital Habitats ^[8] keeps growing, too.  For example, have you used Twitter to conduct a poll ^[9]?

Of course all these pages are incomplete.  They need work.  Could you contribute?

Religions, communities and practice

During June, July and August ^[10], CPsquare capped off a conversation that has been brewing for 4 years, considering religious and spiritual communities from a community of practice perspective.

Once we started looking, what seems remarkable is that we conventionally think of religious and spiritual communities as completely different from the garden variety communities we observe or cultivate in corporations, schools and other institutions.  But come to find out, they’re not really so different.  Here are a few snippets from the conference.

• A traditional social form such as praying together is striking when we consider it as a learning activity.  May seem strange, but it’s not so far-fetched!  And prayer is a more malleable form than you might imagine.   One example we discussed was a prayer request meeting at Coco’s restaurant in Lake Forest that Saddleback Church sponsors.  It’s described on pp. 65-69 of Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us ^[11], (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010). It sure sounds like a community of practice meeting to me! (If you’re curious, the book has a website ^[12] and a blog .)  Another example we looked at was how two Catholic nuns, Sisters Julie and Maxine, that have evolved a practice of regular prayer as a podcast on their website, http://anunslife.org ^[13].  Part of what makes it work as a podcast is that the sisters are exemplary community leaders: inviting, warm, authentic, and above all inquisitive.  Of course having the technology stewardship ^[14]chops never hurts. Question: what similar traditional community activities have you seen translate to the Internet? (Or fail to translate?)

• We also explored the relationship between formal organizations and communities in religious and spiritual the context.  From the organizational side, we heard about a very successful CoP on project management in the Mormon Church’s Office of Temporal Affairs that sounds remarkably similar to CoP projects in other corporate settings: dealing with organizational silos, the dance between formal and informal structures, gathering just enough resources for the community to grow, and keeping a focus on value-for-time.  From the opposite side, after the conference, Grady McGonagill ^[15] shared a draft in CPsquare’s R&D Series of a study he is working on that looks at more than a dozen Buddhist meditation communities, considering how they depend on and develop formal organizational structures.  It seems that both “community inside!” and “organization inside!” are viable (and they all seem to have “Intel inside!”).  A third multivalent example comes from a session where Lisa Colton ^[16] described independent minyanim ^[17]which are self-organized Jewish worship and study communities.  They can either be an extension of or a (possibly threatening) alternative to traditional organized synagogues.
  Question: Does friendliness to communities have anything to do with whether an organization is “secular” or not?

• Joe Kutter, an American Baptist pastor and the director of that denomination’s Minister’s Council ^[18] talked about pastors in protestant churches as a group who greatly benefits from participation in a community of practice because of how a leadership role can isolate people.  Among other things, he shared a big study ^[19] that makes very interesting comparisons between pastors who participate in Pastoral Leader Peer Groups and those who don’t.   There are remarkable differences between the churches where those pastors serve, too.  (The study concluded that participation in peer learning had a very positive effect on factors such as church membership growth as well as leadership integrity and persistence.)
  Question: Is the presence or absence of community participation in a group of organizations a useful metric? Where have you seen it used?

So it turns out that the religious and spiritual side of society is an important laboratory for experimentation, conservation, and assessment of learning and communities of practice.  Maybe this summer’s conference is not “the end”, but rather an important new thread of our ongoing conversations about communities of practice.