This week we are having a great dissertation fest session, where CPsquare member and soon to be Lieutenant Major Pete Kilner, presented research that grew out of his work with CompanyCommand, a community of practice in the U.S. Army. It was really great to see how Pete combines a passion for his community, insights into the dynamics of distributed communities, and careful research. The topic of his dissertation was the connection between socially relevant representations (SRRs) and willingness to contribute to a community. An SRR is any representation that contributes social-context information that is not part of the domain-area information in question (Hoadley and Berman 1995; Hoadley 1999; Hoadley and Kirby 2004).
One of the stories that Pete told about himself is that some time ago he objected to putting effort into republishing bits of CompanyCommand conversations in a magazine. He shared an article from the November 2006 example of Army Magazine that contained online conversations with photos of community members in action. (Interestingly, the article did a great job of providing a lot of social context.) It turns out that exposing their community like that has been very helpful in developing awareness of and credibility for the community, not only with the community's sponsors, but also with members as well. It gives community members a sense of the context around their community. No community of practice is an island, I guess. Charting the sea of the larger social context is really important.
An hour after I'd finished posting the audio recording of our opening session with Pete, I ran across a blog posting by Nancy White, "Bringing Guests into a Workshop, Community or Meeting". It's a great example of practice and reflection that's happened in or around CPsquare, in community meetings or workshops, that was discussed in a "Help in Real Time" session and then turned into a useful artifact for others to use.
Posted by smithjd at January 20, 2007 07:24 PM | TrackBack