Here it is: “a slightly more formal discussion with accompanying facilitation and synthesis on the theme of “Communities of Pratice in Development Contexts”
I have been invited to help with facilitation and in this post I intend to give you some introduction, in a separate post the discussion will be kicked off.
Summary for who is short of time:
- Some people within KM4dev did a project on Communities of Practice in development contexts, which they like to share with us
- We intend to start a discussion on KM4dev’s email group. Posts will have as the first part of the subject line “CoPs4dev”.
- To prime discussion excerpts from a larger document will be used.
- KM4dev community is asked to react, complement, share their views; we intend to facilitate and synthesize the discussion.
- A cops4dev blog (THIS blog) is used as a central place to gather resources as well as to provide access to non-KM4dev members.
- All are encouraged to use as a del.icio.us tag “cops4dev” for additional resources you might come across.
- Look at the next post with some provocative questions on funding of CoPs and join the discussion!
Background
(based on Dorine’s blogpost)
In the framework of a course by CP-square on “Foundations of Communities of Practice” three participants, all KM4dev members, decided to do a course project on “Cultivating Communities of Practice (CoPs) in a Development Context”. They reviewed written case studies of communities of practice in development, gathered (links to) resources such as relevant articles and websites and interviewed 5 people with experience in CoPs in development:
Authors:
• Patricia Mantey (Knowledge Management Specialist at the Academy for Educational Development, Washington, US)
• Bill Williams (Lecturer at Setubal Polytechnic, Portugal)
• Dorine Ruter (KM specialist at ETC, Netherlands)
Interviewees:
• Ueli Scheuermeier
• Nancy White
• Joitske Hulsebosch
• Beverly Trayner
• Lucie Lamoureux
The questions ~These are the questions the authors asked, which we intend to discuss in sequence
1. Life after Funding
- How can you build in capacity so that these communities can transition (from one-off) and continue to function autonomously after the life-span of the funded activity is over?
- How can donor support encourage collaboration between NGOs so as to facilitate community building?
2. Gaps in Technology
- Do you have any experience or insight to share regarding how communities in developing countries are finding ways to overcome differences in access to technology and connectivity to share knowledge and experience to support their activities?
- Likewise, what are useful ways of approaching the issue of different levels of technical expertise?
3. Differences in Communities
- Are there significant ways communities in developing countries are different to those in developed countries? If you look at the development sector, you might say it has a specific learning culture, focusing on action and output, just like the health sector or education sector has its own culture.
- How would this culture influence the way communities of practice can be utilized?
- Which tools will work better because of this culture?
- Is there a specific sequence of events or tools that will do well in this culture?
4. Multiple Cultures and Languages
- Community members may be from different cultures or speak different languages. On what levels and in which ways does this affect how the community works? E.g. what is the effect on community meetings or group hierarchy or chemistry?
- Example, challenges, and solutions (for members and / or facilitators) in these contexts?
5. Donor Pressure and Expectations
- How can you manage the expectation of donors when working with communities they fund to prevent the donor from dominating the community (e.g. language, topics addresses, and rhythm) and expecting specific outputs, but at the same time support an effective community that is viewed by the donor as an effective investment?
- What about ownership of the outputs and issues of intellectual property rights? Examples of communities with effective relationships with community funders/sponsors?
The result
The end result of this project is in one document. It contains interviews, case descriptions, highlights, and a resource list. Interviewees had a change to review their contribution. The document is here: Cultivating Communities of Practice in Development Contexts. We will post excerpts and “goodies” from the main document for the different stages of the discussion.
Way of working
We thought the following might work to focus contributions:
-start with one sub-theme i.e. “Life (of communities of practice) after funding”
-a start-of post with some excerpts (from the main document) on the relevant theme and some questions
-invite reactions, clarifications from the interviewees, additions, critiques, feed-back
-synthesize the discussion
Why a blog?
We have opened a blog to have a public, central place where all resources can be stored and easily found back. Start post and summaries will be posted here. It is a central place to read up in case you have missed some parts of the discussion. It is also a place where non-KM4dev members can access the discussion. Although the blog could be used for contributions of non-KM4dev members, the km4dev list is where we invite the discussion to take place.
The tag “cops4dev” can be used to tag resources: these are shown on the blog through an rss-feed.
blog: http://cops4dev.wordpress.com/
tag: http://del.icio.us/tag/cops4dev
