This is the story of how a "CPsquare event" emerged from the initiative of a few individuals as a new venue for conversation that you could repeat elsewhere and with other communities — reaching out to some of the diverse groups and sectors that are interested in a subject by weaving a thread (about communities of pratice in this case) into the warp and woof of a more conventional conference.

On the planning side

E-learn Conference, sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE) , was held in Montreal, Canada, from October 15th through the 19th, 2002. The conference offered a community development strand and a wide variety of presentation types. Bronwyn Stuckey (with Sally Edwards) and John Smith (with Marc Coenders), all alumni of the Foundations for Communities of Practice workshop, submitted full papers to the conference. Bronwyn had presented at other AACE conferences before, knew the conference management and was convinced that a communities of practice thread would weave well into the existing conference fabric.

We had encouraged people to submit papers through com-prac-study (nearly a year before the conference and almost as an afterthought in the context of a teleconference event, and later as submission deadlines got close). Once their papers were accepted, Bronwyn and John set about inviting people to help create a distinct communities of practice day in the conference. Coincidentally, Etienne was invited to give a keynote address, so our efforts to invite people became more organized and focused. John identified and rallied the key presenters and Bronwyn acted as broker, overseeing the schedule, venues, papers and publications with the conference organizers. Later yet we invited people to attend through com-prac and other means (i.e., contacting other workshop alumni, especially those who lived in Canada).

What came into being was a group of some 12 presenters from six different countries bridging the four main domains of the conference: higher education, health care, government and corporate e-leanring. Some of the people who would share the podium had never physically met each other. They would present papers, panels, round tables, interactive sessions and lead dialogue in special interest groups throughout the final full day of the conference. The organized thread allowed people who were deeply involved in the subject to talk with each other and it made it easy for people who were less involved in the subject to listen in to this ongoing conversation..

One of the angles in the circle

In practice

Papers in the community strand had been scheduled earlier in the week to prevent schedule conflicts with the communities of practice day, when Bronwyn and John would be providing continuity from session to session. The first encounter for most of the thread participants was a Special Interest Group (SIG) meeting on Wednesday evening. In that meeting we discovered much about the work people were doing by just handing the microphone around the circle. The interest in the subject, the diversity of perspectives, and the amount of experience that were present at the E-Learn conference were quite remarkable. A conference attendee from New Zealand wrote afterwards:

"I was glad to be involved in the Communities of Practice stream throughout the conference as it re-enforced 95% of what we have been doing as positive and productive and near the leading edge - which has to be a good thing! :-)"

Of course, the day's proceedings were also rigorously reviewed in one of the hotel's bars at the end of the day

Learning on the social side

One of our strategies, to save money and to concentrate energy, was to invite everyone we knew who was attending the conference to stay in the same rather less expensive hotel, which we dubbed "the communities of practice ghetto", just a few blocks from the more expensive conference hotel. We arranged for people to share rooms. As our thread gathered momentum, business and other meetings were attached to the schedule. (A formal CPsquare meeting about technology strategy took a full day on the Wednesday but conversations among the four of us who were in the midst of conducting the Fall 2002 Foundations workshop (Bronwyn, Etienne, John and Marc) had to fit in and around everything else.

We met new and old friends in the hotel lobby: be there at seven and be CPsquare

Where some of the real discussions took place