Pull up the rocking chair and let us set and talk a while
As Extension professionals, we know that conversation and relationship building within our communities of practice and our communities of interest is the key to all that we do. Sharing, storytelling, asking questions, and providing answers is our core mission.
But what are the best solutions for doing that?
That is a key question that Sue Hawkins, Project Coordinator for the Sustainable Ag Energy Community of Practice is asking of her colleagues on the Content Management Board and of the eXtension Staff. Where does she go to do that? Where’s the best place to share information and build community among the coordinators and leaders of our Communities of Practice. And it’s a question, that John McQueen, of the eOrganic Community of Practice and Karen Jeannette, of the Consumer Horticulture Community of Practice, have been asking too.
Help us crowd-source that answer. What do you think? What are the best tools, the best solutions, and the best strategies for sharing? What can the eXtension Initiative staff do to facilitate that sharing? What do our Communities of Practice need to do? What can we all do in Extension to make this better?
Would Get Satisfaction work as a forum? Is the CoP Network at Wet Paint the best place? What about Facebook? or Twitter? Would creating a community and a mailing list at people.extension.org work best?
Are there others? Weigh in with your thoughts in the comments. Or head over to Get Satisfaction or Wet Paint – or start a new discussion in another tool (and let everyone know in the comments where that is).
What a coincidence – Jason Austin just asked a very related question in the NCSU Web Development Ning site.
http://ncsuwebdev.ning.com/forum/topics/figuring-out-the-how-for
The discussion generated there might be of interest to those interested in this discussion.
IMHO, it’s going to take a set of tools.
* A place that automatically generates RSS/atom feeds when a contribution is made – so people can be notified (reminded about the project) when changes are made. Could some threaded discussion feature be added to the Communities (https://people.extension.org/communities/)
The CoP Network at Wet Paint seems to me like it would be the best place IF we want to move the discussion out of the eXtension domain and require participants to get another account on another service. I don’t have a problem doing that, but there are a lot of people who do.
* Regardless of what tool is used, the participants (CoP members in this discussion) need to be using some feed agrigator to be able to conveniently get the feeds brought to their attention. This could be as simple as using a tool like http://www.feedmyinbox.com/, a feed reader like http://reader.google.com/, or FriendFeed and even adding to that something like Twhirl.
There needs to be a way for contributors with different levels of commitment to be able to participate and follow the discussions. Some, just want to keep apprised of what’s going on and will contribute once or twice a year. Others are truly committed and want to be involved in every discussion and decision.
What are the differences between Ning and Wet Paint?
Any reasons for choosing one over the other?
I don’t know. John McQueen with the eOrganic CoP would need to weigh in on that more. John and Karen Jeanette took point on looking at Wet Paint – which I and others asked them to do in the hope that having folks within the Community drive the tool, it would see better adoption than what we were seeing with Elgg, email lists, chat, and other related discussion tools that have been “centrally implemented/supported”. I believe that at the time, Wet Paint supported OpenID – and that was a driving factor for taking an initial look at it. Ning doesn’t and won’t support OpenID – in favor of their own NingID used across Ning “networks” (and Wet Paint doesn’t any longer, because they ran into low use/support problems with their OpenID implementation.)
John, that’s a great question – and I’ve followed up with some comments in the Get Satisfaction thread – to keep trying that out as a discussion forum.
Communications for a Community of Practice takes place on different levels. First you have the leaders of the CoP, and the members. eXtension is providing the ability to do just that with their mailing lists in the People app. In eOrganic, we also have the coordinators for the project. This is about 4 people and their supervisors, who we call the staff. Then within the CoP each of our topic groups need the ability to communicate effectively. Add on top of this the desire for leaders/coordinators of various CoPs to have a place for discussions/questions. Whoa! This is a lot of communication!
Most of this can be handled by email, and is. But there are disadvantages to using email, most notably the lack of transparency and the ability to archive the information in a central location for future use. This is where the online discussion part can help. But will people communicate online? Depends on the topic and their experience with doing so. Often a conversation will start online and then migrate to email. Sometimes you want this and sometime you don’t.
So what technology is needed to make this happen. The Facebook-like model is a good one. This is what I see as the minimum. First, everyone is already there (People app? Get Satisfaction?). You can create groups and join groups. In that group you can simply email everyone, or post to a discussion board (forum) which notifies the group by email of your post. Comments can be added to that post in a threaded or non-threaded fashion. There is an RSS feed and the ability to turn off the email notification for those who are comfortable with using a feed reader.
How and where does this happen? I agree with the notion that this should start with the people on the ground because they are the ones that are going to make this happen or not. I also see the need for some kind support from up on high to be engaged in the discussions and the big question, should they even provide a starting place to hold this data? The worry is that the project will fail, and all the time and resources spent on it will be lost. This is why I’m starting to come down on the side of using Get Satisfaction as a place to see if this will work. Although it only handles one level of communication I mentioned, between CoPs and eXtension, it could be a model for how a CoP might facilitate discussion within their own group. How CoPs handle communication internally is up to them. This can not be standardized. What can be worked on is providing models of work, something that eXtension is already doing successfully in other areas.