We work in practice groups…

We are organizing practice groups on various topics. These practice groups will be working together to share knowledge and build tools for practitioners. As a member of CPsquare you can actively join any number of practice group. In addition, you have access to the work of all practice groups. The practice groups in Wave 1 are the ones we are now organizing. In Wave 2 are others we are thinking about for the near future. We invite you to consider which practice groups you are interested in joining, whether you join as an active participant, take a leadership role or even get one going.

Wave 1: under construction

Internal/external consultants

• Domain: providing coaching and advice for communities and/or running a community-based knowledge initiative
• Members: support team or internal consultants, external consultants, CKO's, CLO's, corporate university or training program leaders
• Issues: designing an organization-wide knowledge initiative, methods for launching new communities and developing established ones, linking communities and business processes (teams, BU's, etc.), measures, and working with executive sponsors.

• Domain: providing leadership to cultivate vibrant communities that effectively serve members and their stakeholders
• Members: community coordinators and other community leaders
• Issues: starting up a new community or reviving an existing one, bringing members together, fostering a community spirit, encouraging participation, designing events for members to share knowledge or co-consult on cases and problems, dealing with community group dynamics, facilitating meetings (face-to-face and online), stewarding the practice, building a knowledge base, etc.

• Domain: community-oriented technologies and their use
• Members: technologists, vendors, customers, and users—who design, buy, customize, and deploy collaborative technologies, taxonomies, and knowledge bases
• Issues: understanding what technologies are best for what purposes, following the evolving technology market, benchmarking and comparing systems, addressing organizational, social and behavioral issues for effective deployment and use of technology, pricing and budget issues

• Domain: governance challenges, models, and structures for communities
• Members: community leaders, internal and external consultants, executive sponsors, CKO's and CLO's, "knowledge board" members who guide an organization-wide initiative, etc.
• Issues: designing a governance structure for a community of practice, honoring the values of members, creating sub-committees and coordinating an overall governance process, understanding the role and function of a top-level advisory group, selecting members for various committees, making sure all the constituencies have a voice, avoiding bureaucracy.

• Domain: organizing and sustaining productive communities among customers
• Members: Internal and external consultants, executives of both provider and customer organizations, product-development and marketing managers
• Issues: starting a customer community, orienting members, building on traditional focus groups, understanding how a community approach is different, leveraging both the ideas and relation-building benefits for the organization and for members, helping customers share knowledge about how to use and adapt an organization's products and services and take advantage of what others have learned from experience, getting leading customers to work closely with the organization to develop new products and services

Associations

• Domain: applying a community-based approach to associations, professional societies, and other non-profit groups
• Members: executive directors and staff, volunteer program leaders, leading professionals in their field, etc.
• Issues: transforming an association that focuses primarily on informal networking, professional news, certification, and advocacy into one that provides rich opportunities for peer-to-peer learning; finding clusters of members who share particular problems and interests; providing more systematic ways to connect with peers with shared interests; cultivating "sub-communities"; building the association's capacity to provide an infrastructure so members can share knowledge, publish their work, and find colleagues who share a question or have an answer
  

Agriculture research and communities

• Domain: applying a community-based approach to the conduct and dissemination of agricultural research
• Members: researchers in agriculture, development specialists and consultants, members of international agencies
• Issues: creating partnerships between local practitioners and researchers; understanding local customs; translating among perspectives; addressing issues of culture, power, and institutional transformation

Healthcare

• Domain: community-based initiatives throughout the healthcare systems in many different countries: how communities have been developed, what works well, what innovations have resulted.
• Members: health professionals in the entire healthcare system, from researchers to practitioners at a range of levels
• Issues: time efficiency of communities in a stressed system, attracting appropriate investment and involvement

CPtoolkit
Executive sponsors
Community-based approach to training
Global communities
School leadership
Community-based associations
City development (World design)
Government inter-agency communities
Cross-government innovation
Baby boomers issues: dealing with retirement
R&D/Product-development/Innovation
Mergers & acquisitions
Sales force
The new university