CPsquare education news

Can CoP learning be outsourced?

Communities of practice are vital learning forums within and across organizations. Does it make any sense to outsource "training" to or about communities? This (online & telephone) conference for Workshop alumni and CPsquare members will look at several questions related to cases where an organization has sent a group to CPsquare's Foundations workshop, or has encouraged individuals to attend.

• Can a CoP experience be outsourced?
• What unique benefits might there be in such an outsourcing arrangement? What unique risks? What other issues arise in specific cases?
• Can CoP "training" be outsourced?
• Is it possible to "teach" CoP competencies using traditional education methods?
• Why did some of these cases appear to be very successful while others were not? What are the design implications -- for either partner?

CPsquare facilitators have offered an online Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop sixteen times since 1998. Each of the following cases has this workshop as the common element. In every case, the organization or university encouraged participation in the Foundations Workshop in order to provide experiential learning about communities of practice. In the case of the organizations, there was an expectation that this learning would be applied internally. (For the university case, the hope was that the learning would be applied in learners' organizations, volunteer work or consulting practices.)

Here are the proposed cases for discussion:

1. In the Fall of 1998, StorageTek sent 6 people to Etienne Wenger's Knowledge Ecology University workshop on Communities of Practice.
2. in the Spring of 2000 Clarica insurance sent 10 independent insurance agents to the workshop. ...
3. Martin Dugage brought 10 participants to the workshop in the Fall of 2002. ...
4. CGIAR sent 20 participants over the course of 3 workshops in 2002. ...
5. In the Spring of 2003, CPsquare and Royal Roads University worked together to offer a new graduate level four-credit course, which incorporated the workshop as a virtual field trip. The patnership idea evolved from the edges of both organizations, through a series of on-line and face to face interactions and was not without controvery. The course received extremely positive ratings. Why was this collaboration a success?
6. In the Summer of 2003, Linda Polin urged doctoral students to join CPsquare as a professional bridge or home after graduate school. (This is quite different from sending people to a workshop, but may raise similar issues re partnership & formality.)

In the conference we'll develop more detail about each one of these cases. We believe that this discussion is important because:

• We've just completed the 16th Foundations workshop; we owe it to ourselves to examine what we've been doing over the past several years,
• This exploration will guide the strategy or design of CPsquare, the partnership with Royal Roads, and possibly the work of other organizations.
• These cases might exemplify issues that come up when relatively organic communities interact with relatively formal institutions in many other settings, from medicine to economic development.

Join us for a 3 week inquiry into these and related cases. We'll have online discussion and one or more telephone conferences. The online space opens on March 24, 2004. The scheduled teleconference is on April 7th at 20:00 GMT. The online space closes April 16.

Who's invited: anybody who has participated in the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop, CPsquare members, and invited guests.