In the Winter of 2001, when we were doing the Foundations Workshop on Web Crossing for the first time, two of the participants were from Portugal. One of them kept proposing that we all come visit Portugal, maybe staying at her brother's donkey farm. Her invitation got the idea going but it was the other participant from Portugal, named Beverly Trayner, who took the lead in actually making it happen. So, after months of discussions in Web Crossing, phone conferences and emails, in June of 2002, Etienne, Nancy White, Bronwyn Stuckey, and more than 20 others who had been in the Foundations workshop (or were somehow connected through our network) gathered at a windmill above Setúbal that had just been converted to a bed & breakfast. It took a lot of perseverence, ingenuity, and imagination -- a lot of passion -- to pull it off. Our dialog lasted for four and a half days. It was a fantastic experience -- as one woman from Germany said, being able to report on her dissertation research to that group was far more satisfying than presenting it to the committee that would grant her a PhD.
Part of the way we made those four days in Setúbal affordable was to organize a public conference sponsored by the university where Beverly Trayner taught. I think there were some 65 people attending on that Thursday. The day started off with an introductory talk by Etienne, followed by a dozen or so parallel sessions where we each gave a talk about our work with communities of practice. After the intimacy, sustained inquiry and sheer intensity of the dialog, rousing ourselves from our utter exhaustion to give little lectures to an audience that in some cases had a limited command of English was a bit of a challenge. At the time, the day seemed pretty flat, compared to the passionate intensity of the dialog, although you never know.
There was something about how we combined the face-to-face dialog and online preparation for Setúbal that seemed important to understand, and, if possible, learn to replicate. Two years later, during the second week of October, as Beverly Trayner, Nancy White and I drove into Lisbon from Setúbal, our conversation drifted off from the "official topic" (planning the day's agenda for the second of our three face-to-face days on the design of learning events for communities of practice, which was the third or fourth follow-on experiment with the online-face-to-face-online sequence that we happened upon originally at Setúbal). We got to talking about the current Foundations Workshop, about household composition and about "absent participants." There was a group of people from one large corporation who seemed to all be absent. Nancy asked about them. (I always think that she knows everybody online, and it turned out that, even though most of her work is with non-profits and international NGOs, she had done some work with that company.) And beyond that, it turned out she did know one of the participants (I was complaining about them all being "mostly absent" and how that causes difficulty in running such a complex little learning community as we do in the Workshop). Nancy commented that the one she knew had also seemed to be absent from Nancy's workshop back when she took it some months ago, but she had obviously been paying very careful attention, given how she'd incorporated so many of the ideas from Nancy's workshop into a program that she now runs for new managers in her company. So you never know who's listening, or how well, where it might lead, or where the passion is in online interactions.
Later that night, we were walking on the ramparts of a castle in Setúbal that looks over to the very same windmills where we had met more than two years ago. It was at the end of a long day and it looked pretty certain that our workshop was going to be a really big success, partly because of the online interaction, partly because of the conversations between social workers and school teachers showed that they had so much in common, but also partly because the conversation around communities of practice seemed to reframe the ordinary as full of extraordinary possibilities. For some people this would be a real moment of connecting passion with work. Beverly mentioned that the whole effort, the sponsorship of two government agencies, the engagement of the two different professional groups from all over Portugal as well as the funding could mostly be attributed to two women who were in the audience in Setúbal that day two years ago -- and who had been really impressed with what Etienne had to say and what its implications might be for education in Portugal. Later that summer they'd called Beverly and introduced themselves. She gave a talk, then set up an open space meeting later on, and one thing had led to another. So my impression that we were throwing words into the winds with no real traction on the ground was completely wrong. That public conference the day after our dialog had made a difference, just as the four and a half days of dialog that preceded it made a difference for our incipient little community of practice (in my opinion people who've taken the Foundations Workshop, and especially those who were at Setúbal, have ended up being kind of an energetic backbone for CPsquare). I guess you really don't ever know.
There had been a lot of ups and downs as we planned this current workshop in Lisbon. One of the apparent "downs" was when we had to register some additional participants at the very last minute (actually, a whole week after the online portion had started, and we were all really feeling overwhelmed with the workshop launch, dealing with bad email addresses, technology jitters, and all the normal chaos around the launch of an online workshop). On top of that it was just starting to sink in that most of the conversations in this workshop would be in Portuguese (Beverly speaks Portuguese well and Nancy speaks the Brazilian variety amazingly well, so I was limping along trying to read what everyone was writing using my Spanish). Soone of the workshop sponsor says, "Guess what? You're going to have three Romanians in the workshop, too!" We had to say OK, but since they were a week late we said we wouldn't do any translating (supposedly they spoke English, but no Portuguese, and we just couldn't help them deal with the torrent of Portuguese). In the end, it turned out that the three Romanian women who had registered late but barely shown up in the online space showed up for the face-to-face part of the workshop in Lisbon. And it turned out that they were the research arm of the Romanian department of public education. During the face-to-face it was almost comic to see someone speak in Portuguese, have their words rendered into English by an interpreter, and then have the youngest Romanian translate it into Romanian for their senior person who didn't sepak English either. I thought, "What could they possibly be getting out of this?" Of course, I was struggling trying to follow the conversation, myself!
On the last day, during a reflection conversation, this youngest Romanian said, "When I first started reading about communities of practice and saw the online space, it was like seeing a big mountain that I'd come upon, with smoke behind it in the distance. On Thursday, after the face-to-face day and the discussion about communities of practice, I felt like I had crossed a mountain and was looking down on a big valley and I could see a settlement and there was definitely smoke rising from it. Today in our project discussions about learning events, I felt like I got close and I saw that there was a fire -- and, indeed, that it was really hot!"
And that led to a discussion about putting on a workshop in Romania next year. Who knows what the long-term effects of that will be!