Laboratório CIARIS

Author: Carla

  08 October 2009 

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O novo CIARIS

Author: Carla

  25 August 2009 

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Estamos agora numa nova fase na evolução da plataforma. Foram actualizados e melhorados alguns aspectos, alguns deles poderão passar despercebidos aos utilizadores mais desatentos, mas irão certamente melhorar a performance da utilização da plataforma.

Mas isto é apenas o começo, o primeiro passo para algumas evoluções mais visíveis e, sobretudo, muito urgentes para tornar o site mais fácil de utilizar pelos membros CIARIS.

Estas evoluções irão demorar vários meses, mas o resultado irá, certamente, corresponder às nossas e vossas expectativas. Fiquem atentos às novidades!

Week 3 to 5 Foundations Workshop

Author: Carla

  13 October 2008 

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Things are getting exciting!

These three weeks are dedicated to the Practice Lab, meaning that workshop participants can launch ideas for projects that will be developed within the workshop. These are supposed to be simple projects, just ideas on which we can elaborate on and produce some outputs. It doesn't have to be a final product - just an outline that can be continued after the workshop is over if participants wish to do it.

The projects that arose have to do with the launching and maintaining of CoPs. They are all related and linked, different moments of a CoP life, but since we don't have much time, it was better to divide in different groups to tackle more specifically each one of those moments.

It's interesting to see people grouping, organizing themselves and working together on issues that interest them  without ever meeting before. Despite the fact we are all strangers, we have identified common interests and set a common ground for our actitivities these weeks.

What's even more interesting, is that there's somehow the expectation that people will stay in contact and still work on these and other kind of projects if that makes sense to them. It may not happen because it's not easy to keep people connected when we all have so much to do and so many priorities to attend to... but it's very comforting and reassuring that that possibily exists and everyone is aware of it.

Week 2 on CPsquare Foundations workshop

Author: Carla

  06 October 2008 

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Time flies!

We already finished week 3, and so much is going on that I ended up not posting anything during week 2. But, like they say, better late than never...

So, during week 2 we had the opportunity to go into the domain of Communities of Practice: what they are, how can we define them, what boundaries do they have, how can we nurture them, what kind of models have been identified... We had a great conversation with Etienne Wenger and engaged in some interesting discussions.

One of the issues raised during the discussions was the difference between Community of Practice and Network. We all had some difficulties in understanding the boundaries between the two and it's still not clear in the sense that its definition also depends on the person's perception and where that person is standing in the group.

From our discussions came a general understanding that a Community of Practice is a group of people who share a common interest or passion and who interact on a regular basis to share how they do things and to learn how to do it better.

In a network, there may be also some learning purposes, but the engagement and interaction within the group is not the same. In a network, the interest in the group depends on what a person can take out of the group or if the group is open to what that person has to contribute. In a community of practice, the interest in the group is in the people, in the interaction between them and in the passion and practices they share.

Having this distinction in mind, the perception of what a group is depends on where the person is standing in the group. So the same group can be seen both as a community of practice and as a network. For people standing in the center of the group, they may see it as a CoP: they share a passion, they put all their efforts to share their knowledge and practices with others and together learn how to improve the work they are doing. They care for it, they nurture it.

But for people more in the periphery of the group, that only came once and a while to check on what's being done, but is not interacting, engaging and nurturing, than for them that same group is a network - even if it's still a learning network.

With this discussion I came to think of CIARIS. We talk about "CIARIS network" and "CIARIS community" to refer to people who are members of this group and are interested in social inclusion. But how many of us do share a passion for "social inclusion"? It's such a broad subject, that includes some many different issues, it's hard not to get lost in it...

But within this network,we can find many passions shared by different people. There are people passionate about social protection, gender, HIV/AIDS, employment, women entrepreneurship and so on. And in the effort to come together to share what they do, trying to learn from each other to improve their work, they ended up nurturing communities of practice.

I think this is why CIARIS is such an interesting case and has such an interesting story. In this platform, CIARIS has created and offered conditions for its users to work on those passions, coming together in workspaces, building up their identities, their sense of belonging and ownership of what's being produced/learned in the groups.

I would say the best way to define CIARIS would be of a network hosting a constellation of communities (I'm borrowing Etienne's expression).

The challenge now, I think, is how we take back to rest of the network all the learning being shared in the communities? How do we manage these sub-groups within a bigger group? And that is another big discussion...

Week 1 on CPsquare Foundations workshop

Author: Carla

  26 September 2008 

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So there we were on our first telephone conference.

We were around 30 people, a few of us knew some of the others, most of us were complete strangers. Some of us were at home at the time of the telephone conference, others at the office, and others up in the mountains in Canada, trecking the way up in the snow!

While for those in Europe and Africa it was close to bedtime, for others in the US it was still in the middle of the afternoon - sunny for some, rainy for others - and in Australia the day had just dawned.

Crossing four different continents, different time zones, the call gathered people with different cultures, different backgrounds and different expectations, but we were all moved by the same motivation of knowing more about communities of practice.

The first week in the workshop was mostly dedicated to know more about each other and to do so we were given an exercise: to find a six-degree connection with someone in the workshop. We engaged in many conversations and ended up finding out about each others views from the office window, our pets' names, how many children we have and what do we eat for breakfast!

I must say it was very funny and interesting to see the connections between people that had never met before.

This funny exercise had, nevertheless, a deeper purpose: to prepare us for the following week, where we were assigned to different households while we discuss domain issues: what are communities of practice, what models of CoPs can we find, what do they imply - and from there, determine what are our personal learning objectives for the workshop, i.e., what issues do we want to discuss and learn about.

Despite all support and availability from the workshop leaders and mentors, I still feel overwhelmed by it - there are lots of discussions going on and it's sometimes hard to keep up the rhythm.

I'm keeping in mind the learders advice: don't try to catch up on everything because you can't - just focus on what you feel it's important for you and try to ge the most out of it. But even that is hard to do: it all seems important, it all seems interesting!

I guess that's another learning I have to do: decide what's important and focus on that. Will let you know how I'm managing it!

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