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Design conference with former participants and guests

Although there are many innovations and design elements that work really well in the Foundations of Communities of Practice Workshop, we try new ideas and experiments every time it runs. One element that has been more or less constant since the workshop first ran in 1998 is to have guests join the workshop for a visit that lasts a day or two, allowing workshop participants to get acquainted with practitioners from the larger field of communities of practice.

In the spirit of the workshop, we gathered previous guest speakers and participants for a short conference consisting of phone calls and online discussions to consider whether and how the guests visits might be improved. There were 19 of us who participated: BJ Berquist, Barb McDonald, Bronwyn Stuckey, Cyprien Lomas, Doris Reeves-Lipscomb, Etienne Wenger, Grace Judson, Jerry Yoshitomi, Jeff Stemke, John Parboosingh, John Smith, Joshua Plaskoff, Kelly Edmonds, Kerstin Lambert, Lesley Shneier, Nancy White, Stephane Acel, Tom Ruhl, and Verna Allee.

We discussed how social interactions that had been important to use personally as vehicles for our own learning and participation in communities of practice. There was a strong consensus that a guest visit was a really important element of the workshop -- not a guest lecture, but a visit with a more senior colleague who might just as well bring an issue they're working on, share a case they found interesting, or generally "talk shop." We eventually articulated the following goals for the guest visits; participants could get:

• Information from the guest speaker’s specialty or point of view;
• experience and understanding of engaging with the guest;
• experience with organizing a "visit at a distance";
• a window opened into the broader community of people who deal with communities of practice in various sectors .

We decided that it was important to treat a guest as much as possible as though they are entering a community as well, so it would be good to give them a sense of context as well -- who's in the community and what we've been talking about. To be better hosts, we're thinking we should provide:

• A one-page summary of the Domain Inquiry week discussions (if it's available yet);
• a one-page summary about the projects that are going on during the guest visit;
• a table summarizing who's in the workshop (and a clearer idea of who the participants are who are serving as hosts)
• a guarantee that guests are welcome to rove around the whole workshop but not required in any way to do so

We discussed the issue of participant workload: since the workshop leaders, facilitators, and mentors are all passionately involved in the topic of communities of practice, it's tempting to keep adding to the Foundations Workshop. We actually decided that "less is more" and that we would have one fewer guest, allowing more time to get organized to host the two guests in the schedule and putting more emphasis on being good hosts.

Of course there is something wonderful about just staying in touch with the network that exists around the Foundations Workshop; it's even better to get together and do some good design work as well!

Posted by smithjd at January 15, 2006 12:09 AM | TrackBack