NewsAlthough the cases that have been presented in CPsquare over the past three years have been extremely diverse, useful and interesting, I've felt some dissatisfaction. Several of the large research efforts that have been presented have somehow abstracted and summarized things so that I've felt like we were missing some of the messiness and passion of actual community life. (Life INSIDE CPsquare provides a nice chaotic contrast to neat summaries, I have to say! :-) I think we could go deeper and have a fuller and more sustained relationship with the practice of community leadership.
With that in mind we've set up a series of visits with the leader of a health-related support community that's been active since 1994. The community has a web site and an email list and is interesting in that it welcomes patient, family members, and health professionals to join. I met the community's leader at an iCohere conference last fall and was impressed with the insightful things he had to say, even though he has not been involved in the meta-conversations about communities of practice at all.
So this will be an experiment with "sustained virtual accompaniment of a community leader" over the course of an entire year. We'll have minimal online set-up and fallow-up, mainly meeting with him on the phone on the second Wednesday of each month. I expect that we will learn a lot about the ambiguities, ups and downs and simplicities of community leadership.