Week 2 on CPsquare Foundations workshop
06 October 2008
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...
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