Beth's Blog: Nonprofits and Social Media

Connected Futures: Connected futures: New social strategies and tools for communities of practice

Photo by D'Arcy Norman

I am participating in this year's "Connected Futures: New Social Strategies adn Tools for Communities of Practice" a five week online workshop for community managers, designers and conveners to explore social strategies and tools to support their work.   The workshop begins on April 20th and you can register here.  If you have taken on the role of community manager or are tasked with online facilitation of a community, network, or group and want to see how and if social technologies fit, this is the workshop to take.  

For the first Connected Futures workshop almost a year ago, I led a field trip to the NpTech Tag Community and participated as faculty.  I'm excited to see how the workshop as evolved and be a participant.  I've had a long relationship with CSquared.  In 2007,  I was a "leader" in a program called "Shadow the Leader" where I had an opportunity to reflect with colleagues and peers on the challenges and learnings from leading a tagging community.   My relationship with CPsquared grew through my various collaborations, conversations, and explorations with Nancy White.   Everytime I connect with colleagues at Cpsquared, it is an opportunity for reflection.

Recently, I've been exploring John Smith, Nancy White, and Etienne Wenger's work and their forthcoming book on technology stewardship for communities of practice called Digital Habits.  (Be sure to check out the Technology for Communities wiki too).   I'm in California this week and for the long plane ride, I printed out a copy of the Action Notebook which summarizes dozens of practical steps that you need work through if you are stewarding a community of practice that fall under four theme areas: 

Preamble: reflection on the role of tech steward

Step 1: understanding your community, its characteristics, orientation, and current configuration

Step 2: providing technology: choosing a strategy, selecting a solution, and planning the change

Step 3: stewarding technology in use, in the life of the community and at its closing

I've been thinking about the role of a technology steward and how the tasks, skills, and role applies to someone who works in a nonprofit and is responsible for social media strategy.  We know that successful social media strategy isn't as effective when it is siloed with one person in the organization - the intern in the corner or a part of a web staff person's job.  The organization has to own it.  I'm also looking at this role in the context of working wikily.   

In the Action Notebook for DigitalThe Preamble is a set of reflective questions about "Being a Technology Steward" that help you discover your community's capacity, ability to learn, time capacity, and role in the community.  These are great questions for social media strategists or those responsible for social media strategy in their nonprofit to think about if they are to take an evanglist role within the organization.

Often, I get the question "What wiki software should we use?" or "What blogging platform should we use?" - and that's a great question, but there several steps that come before answering that question.  The first step, of course, is to understand your audience or community - and its context.    I love the sequence and categories of questions that are presented in the Digital Habitat's Action Notebook  and I can't wait to test these out. 

The worksheets under Step 1 are the assessment of your community members, the group's orentations, and current use of technology tools.   I played around with some of the new diagram features of powerpoint to create a visual that puts the first step on one page.  I probably oversimplified it.  (you can download the slide here and revise), so here goes:

 
Flickr screencapture here

What I like most is the section that is labeled as "Technology Aspirations" or what I relabeled as "Technographics."  The questions really unpack the issue of technology comfort without any judgements.   You need to consider and respect Technology Savvy (Does your community have the interest and skills to learn new tools) and Technology Tolerance (What is your community's patience with technology?).   Looking at this way really helps you avoid the trap of shiny object syndrome and making tool driven decisions.

Connected Futures Workshop: Reflection from NpTech Tag Community Field Trip

I've been lucky enough to be involved with the planning and curriculum development as well as the instruction for Connected Futures:  New Social Strategies and Tools for Communities of Practice workshop with John Smith and Brownyn Stuckey as well as Beverly Trayner, Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, Nick Noakes, Shawn Callahan, Shirley Williams, and Susanne Nyrop.   The workshop design looks at how to considering the role and activity of the technology stewards in authentic situations as well as exploring the uses of social technologies to stay in touch as well as for sustained inquiry.

Last week was the first week of our workshop as laboratory and Brownyn offered her meta reflections here and Sus Nyrop shared her thoughts here and Nancy White here.

The second week of the workshop started last week and it is a week of "field trips" to existing communities of practice. I followed to lead trip into the NpTech Tag Community.   This was an excellent opportunity to reflect and look back of the last 3-4 years of community history, consider what's coming down the pike, and have a group of colleagues who pondering the question of how to integrate web2.0 or social technologies into community of practice work ask amazing questions.   

I put together an informal presentation and readings that covered the overall community considerations, domain considerations, and practice considerations.  The participants will write up some more formal reflections towards the end of this week.

Some initial quick reflections:

• Listening is a key skill of a community technology steward (Nancy White, Etienne Wenger, and John Smith has working on a book about this topic).  It's about paying attention to members, welcoming new members, knowing when to stand back and when to push.
• Having a facilitator - the summaries helped make the tag stream accessible.  The social tools have now evolved to the point where there is easier person-to-person or networked information sharing.
• The community was always a loosely coupled community, porous and is able to grow organically first and then structure second.
• Fragmented conversations are a part of the culture and the community's agility and comfort with using tools is part of that.  May not translate to other communities.
• Pondering the question of whether we're a networked community of practice or community of practice whose members use networks or what Nancy White describes the sweet spot between communities and networks - oh, I wish I had the time to ponder and reflect, but not yet.
• An important skill set is filtering what's useful

 

I'll facilitating week 5 along with Shawn Callahan and Susanne Nyrop that is focused on helping participants summarize their learnings and think through implementation the day after I return from Australia.

Connected futures: New social strategies and tools for communities of practice