From [[http://cpsquare.org CPsquare]], the community of practice on communities of practice.

CPsquare field trips -- visits to living communities quarterly excursions to online communities, open to CPsquare members and friends, organized and presented in cooperation with SCOPE Community Enthusiasts.

Project Participating Category

Contents 1 Who 2 Where 3 What 3.1 Community 3.2 Framework 4 Why 5 Report

Who

• Our field trip leader is Randy Fisher
• Community demographics:

Where

• Monday, August 10, 2009 15:00 PDT 22:00 GMT (your time zone)
• Elluminate

What

Community

From the WikiEducator site: "WikiEducator aims to build a thriving and sustainable global community dedicated to the design, development and delivery of free content for learning in realisation of a free version of the education curriculum by 2015."

Randy has created an orientation page for the Field Trip on WikiEducator. Four spaces/projects will be highlighted in this field trip:

1. WikiEducator - main site and discussion group

2. LearnShare HIV AIDS

3. Learning4Content

4. HeyWire8 - NZ

Framework

• C4P (see references)

Having one person who is well-versed in the model being used as a framework and who is willing to be the spokesperson or interpreter of the framework will be most useful.

Briefly, the model was developed by Pete Kilner and uses 4 overlapping elements to describe a community's purpose:

• Content - Since the community mostly lives on a wiki, it's very content-oriented.
• Connections - Role of presentations at conferences...
• Conversations - Mostly happened on google groups.
• Context - when we asked about funding and organizational support, a lot of interesting issues emerged about context (at one point it was aimed at countries in the British Commonwealth), funding initiatives, etc.

Why

• Why now? For CPsquare: The idea is to get a CPsquare field trip practice going or rekindled. We're hoping that our practice is refined over time. For WikiEducator the idea was broached 3 months ago -- it seemed that some feedback would be helpful. The WikiEducator is interested in "getting the word out" -- have noticed that the community grows via presentations at conferences.
• What questions the community faces now?

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Report

• There are many projects, sub-communities, and conversations that all overlap. It may take more discipline than we realized to really examine one community.
• Evangelizing wikis seems to be a core purpose of the community.
• We didn't spend quite enough time looking at outcomes of community efforts (because we ranged over such a wide swath of communities). So it was hard to get a sense of individual practice and how the community might influence it.
• We should always ask: What have you learned that might be useful to other communities?