Questions and answers about the workshop

For more Q&A see the CPsquare Educational offerings blog

Question: What amounts of time do the various parts of the workshop require?

Most people have a tough time squeezing the time for workshop activities into their schedules, so we expect them to juggle things around. (Although there have been occasional participant who spends way more than 2 hours a day.) The amount of activity can vary from week to week.

The way the workshop is designed, there are a lot of choices as to what you get involved in and what you spend your time on. (That's one aspect that's just like a real community of practice: lots of juggling and personal decision-making as to what's important!) After the June '2000 workshop, we looked at some system statistics, which showed that people actually made very systematic choices about the different things they read. One woman from a high tech company almost completely skipped the lectures and discussions of theory, but had obviously spent a lot of time in the practice lab and the field trip discussions. Then there were a couple of people who didn't spend much time at all in the practice lab but were very involved in other discussions. Just like real life.

Question: Is it any two hours out of the day for participation or is the schedule coordinated around speakers?

Answer: There are several points in the schedule where there are events that last an hour or so: phone meetings, chats, etc. We also plan virtual field trips and have guest speakers who participate for a day or two. Those events will be published at the very beginning of the workshop and usually some sort of notes are published if you happen to miss an event you're interested in. And the discussion about those events can continue for the duration of the workshop.

We're learning how to do this as we go. In September of 1999 participants from Australia pointed out that almost all of the discussion between one guest speaker and the rest of the workshop participants had taken place during the middle of the night in Australia and the guest didn't return after that. Since then we've tried to make sure guest speakers are available for a longer stretch than just 8 hours in the middle of the day in the U.S.  And we've found that there is a real trade-off: synchronicity leads to a sense of connection and engagement in class discussions up to a certain point, but it can have the unintended consequence of making some people feel left out.  This is a real-life issue that we all face as communities of practice become global.

Question: I want to know more about course content.

Answer: Roughly, the workshop content is divided into 3 topics:

But the approach we take to learning is not to just "tell you". A week in the workshop can include the following activities, focusing on the previous topics:

In addition there are a series of leadership tasks for which people sign up, ranging from organizing a teleconference to summarizing a sphere of activity.

Question:  Why would this workshop be relevant for people working with e-governance and e-democracy?

Answer: Communities of practice are actually central to the whole transformation because in the end, e-democracy has to be about developing civic practices and sharing the knowledge that makes these practices successful.

The issue takes place at a number of levels. First government itself needs to take care of its knowledge as any organization does. Like a large multinational, government has a number of business units (agencies), geographical branches, as well as levels (central versus local) across which knowledge needs to flow. So there is a special role of central government in creating learning systems among its sub-entities. And beyond that, it is interesting to wonder what the role of government can be in supporting knowledge-sharing structures involving citizens or among citizens.

We have been doing some work with the Federal government in the US. Some people have become very interested in communities of practice for three reasons: sharing knowledge within the government (inside and across agencies), across government (federal, state, and local), and with and among citizens. For instance, some communities of practice were started across the country to bring together coalitions concerned with issues such as gun violence and child poverty. The results so far are quite encouraging.

Question: What did you (the instructors) learn from leading the workshop [in the Winter of 2001]?

Here are a few of the insights that we've discussed so far (and some of the actions we're taking as a result):

  1. One group of 4 people from one organization who took the workshop together had regular  face-to-face conversations and shared a lot of common concerns (although they had quite different perspectives and different jobs). Their conversations, whether at breakfast together or struggling around a computer malfunction, seemed to come back to the workshop and enriched the discussions for all of us. Apart from noting this phenomenon and encouraging people to participate in groups, we thought we could encourage such groups by increasing the discount and extending it so that it would apply even when people from one organization took the workshop at different points in time.
  2. The workshop space that we've developed is not perfect: it involves its own learning curve, especially at the beginning.  Participating takes effort and leading the workshop is a huge time commitment. But it definitely works and we'll continue to refine it.
  3. The workshop's content is rich but also huge: there's a lot to learn, whether you are completely new to the subject or whether you've been thinking about it for years.  We've decided to specifically invite people who had previously participated in the workshop to come back, share their experience, and explore specific questions further. 

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© 2002 CPsquare - Last updated: August 17, 2005