National eXtension Initiative

As a CoP members you can now participate in a monthly Web conferences that is hosted by the Content team for eXtension. These Web conferences will be informal and you can join when your schedule permits. These are not required conferences but just a mechanism to share information, provide a discussion forum, answer questions, provide training (like maybe the Wiki tip of the month!), share products being developed by CoPs, etc.

The monthly web conferences will be every third Tuesday of the month at 2 PM (Eastern), 1 PM (Central), 12 PM (Mountain), and 11 AM (Pacific) and are scheduled for one hour. The first Web conference will be on May 16th. We will be posting information about the Web conferences on the About eXtension blog (http://about.extension.org) as well.

Monthly audio calls with all of the core leadership of the 8 pioneer communities of practice are established starting May 15th. The calls will be an hour in length and will be on the third Monday of every month beginning on May 15th. Time will be 2 PM (Eastern), 1 PM (Central), 12 PM (Mountain), and 11 AM (Pacific).
The number for every audio call is 402.472.6290.

It is not imperative that each member of the core leadership team be on every call, but at least one leadership team member should be present. The calls are to facilitate conversations among the leadership, keep you abreast of activities happening with eXtension, share successes, problems or concerns, keep CoPs moving forward, and other items you feel need to be discussed.

The next Call for Engagement (CFE) was recently announced and in conjunction with that announcement eXtension hosted two workshops about the on developing a proposal for the CFE. There were over 100 participants in the both of the workshops. If you want to view the recordings of these workshop, you can click on either of the links below. The PowerPoint slides used in the workshop are also avialable below. More information on the Call for Engagement can be found on the Community of Practice wiki.

CFE Workshop PowerPoint Presentation
CFE Workshop recorded February 13, 2006
CFE Workshop recorded Febraury 16, 2006

Bioteaming:Why virtual teams need more than internet technology to succeed

What caught my attention was the reference to virtual networked eams being a different beasts…

“Virtually” means that the team will be dependent on Internet technologies much more than before. Less obvious but equally significant is the fact that “virtually” also means that the team operates with “virtual capacity” where virtual is used in its original sense of “not physically present”. This means the team constantly grows and shrinks its active membership throughout its lifetime which makes it much harder to maintain a coherent sense of team and purpose.