We recently did a little travelling around South Africa (Durban/Pietermaritzburg and Johannesburg) running events where we raise awareness of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, the shared resources that are available, the tools that can be used and the communities that develop and support them. We are often asked why people should share. My intention was to spend a lot of time composing the perfect blog post about why sharing is a brilliant idea for everyone and why everyone benefits.

Circumstances haven’t played along so I’m putting some thoughts down and, in the spirit of openness, I hope there will be some discussion and even better arguments forthcoming from the broader community.

In this blog I would like to answer the question: why should the very best schools share their resources?

First, My Conclusion

For a school to continue to compete to be the best it is essential that they participate openly in the global education movement. In fact, the top private/public schools can benefit more from the open educational resources movement than the under-resourced schools because they have strong educators with excellent content and pedagogical knowledge who have the resources and technology around which to innovate.

How do I get to this conclusion?

A Little Context

I happen to have a background in science so I’m going to have a significant bias towards mathematics and science examples. I promise to spend some time looking for the Arts equivalents but they’re out there I just haven’t filtered them effectively yet.

Now to the schools, normally, in South Africa, our team is faced with schools struggling for resources. For them the benefits of the OER movement, primarily openly shared resources, are quite straightforward:

• increased content availability (Connexions,Mindset, CK12, Curriki etc.);
• a multitude of formats print, online, PDF, ePub, and mobile are all available for the same book;
• content can be adapted, contextualised and enhanced (yes because these aren’t the typical audience for which resources are created);
• massive cost savings (~ 1/5 price of publisher’s alternatives) ; and
• a massive reduction in workload for educators.

In our recent travels we’ve also encountered some schools that are the best resourced in South Africa (probably Africa) and would do pretty well by any global metric. Hence, the need to answer the question addressed in this blog. These schools aren’t particularly swayed by:

• the fact that they’ll have a textbook as they already have many;
• the increased content as they can buy rich-media supplements, assessment banks etc.;
• the variety of formats as they can deliver whichever format suits them without accessibility concerns;
• the adaptability of someone else’s content as they typically use their own notes anyway as their departments are strong in content knowledge and pedagogy;
• the cost saving as, let’s face it, they can afford the most expensive premium content; and
• the massive reduction in workload as they are well managed and their departments already collaborate quite well.

So why should these perfectly functioning institutions participate in the OER movement (I’m being serious not sarcastic). Let me be very clear that this isn’t about one school we encountered, there are a few and they’re in very much the same boat.

Consider the School’s Mission

Firstly, any reason I give should be aligned with the schools’ mission statement. For reference here are a number of schools linked to their mission statement. There are two sets of schools listed: those government schools chosen by the Sunday Times in a recent study to be the best in the country and those ranked in a Serve Africa 2011 ranking. I don’t give any particular weight to these metrics, I just needed some way of showing a list of schools where I could blame the bias on someone else!

I won’t analyse these in detail but I challenge you to randomly pick a few and read them. None of these mission statements states a primary objective of getting their learners to pass a matric exam with 50% (or even the minimum which is, sadly, lower). These mission statements talk about providing the best education, supporting the development of responsible, well-rounded, individuals who can participate meaningfully and effectively in society and striving to ensure they fulfil their potential.

The World is Changing (Fast!)

The world is a rapidly changing place, for any school to be providing the best possible education the educators must be up to date. The rate of change has been accelerating because of the internet and rapid advances in technology. This is the world for which learners need to be prepared.

There are some concrete examples that show that society will be different in future just look at the recent events(1, 2) in the Arab world, look at how transparency and open governance are taking hold, how the movement for open data is getting stronger, how governments aren’t able to keep secrets in the same way, how municipalities are being more effective by opening up their data (1, 2) and allowing the public to provide innovative solutions and uses of the data.

My only point here is that the world that educators need to be preparing learners for is changing so rapidly that it absolutely dictates education evolve so you can’t possibly rely on what you did 5 years ago, the world has changed too much.

Openness in Science

Thanks to Francois Grey for a nice sketch of this content.
The increase in connections amongst people provided by the internet has led to many opportunities, most importantly an increase in participatory culture and openness with incredible results.

Grid computing, as it is now called, can best be explained by a famous project, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI@home). Volunteers download a simple computer program which analyses bits of radio data collected by a giant radio-telescope and sends back a short summary of the result to a central server in California. The biggest surprise of this project was not that they discovered a message from outer space. In fact, after over a decade of searching, no sign of extraterrestrial life has been found, although there are still vast regions of space that have not been looked at. The biggest surprise was the number of people willing to help such an endeavour. Over a million people have downloaded the software, making the total computing power of SETI@home rival that of even the biggest supercomputers in the world.

A software platform was built so that this model could be used to solve many other problems. You can read more about this platform, called BOINC, and the many different kinds of volunteer computing projects it supports today, at http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ . There’s something for everyone, from searching for new prime numbers (PrimeGrid) to simulating the future of the Earth’s climate (ClimatePrediction.net). One of the projects, MalariaControl.net, involved researchers from University of Cape Town as well as from universities in Mali and Senegal.

But in recent years, a new trend has emerged in citizen cyberscience that is best described as volunteer thinking. Here the computers are replaced by brains, connected via the Web through an interface called eyes. Because for some complex problems – especially those that involve recognizing complex patterns or three-dimensional objects – the human brain is still a lot quicker and more accurate than a computer.
Volunteer thinking projects come in many shapes and sizes. For example, you can help to classify millions of images of distant galaxies (GalaxyZoo), or digitize hand-written information associated with museum archive data of various plant species (Herbaria@home). This is laborious work, which if left to experts would take years or decades to complete. But thanks to the Web, it’s possible to distribute images so that hundreds of thousands of people can contribute to the search.

Not only is there strength in numbers, there is accuracy, too. Because by using a technique called validation it is possible to practically eliminate the effects of human error. This is true even though each volunteer may make quite a few mistakes. So projects like Planet Hunters have already helped astronomers pinpoint new planets circling distant stars. The game FoldIt invites people to compete in folding protein molecules via a simple mouse-driven interface. By finding the most likely way a protein will fold, volunteers can help understand illnesses like Alzheimer’s disease that depend on how proteins fold.

Volunteer thinking is exciting. But perhaps even more ambitious is the emerging idea of volunteer sensing: using your laptop or even your mobile phone to collect data – sounds, images, text you type in – from any point on the planet, helping scientists to create global networks of sensors that can pick up the first signs of an outbreak of a new disease (EpiCollect), or the initial tremors associated with an earthquake (QuakeCatcher.net), or the noise levels around a new airport (NoiseTube).

Open science is really taking off, just watch the video in this article to really open your eyes.

My point here is that if you happen to be a science educator and you don’t know about these opportunities then are you not only not up to date but you are missing incredible opportunities to expose your learners to real science and you are missing the opportunity to let them actually PARTICIPATE in real science – I can’t stress this enough, as an educator you must be using these tools to give your learners a real world perspective of how science is changing if your goal is the best possible education.

Open Educational Resources

There is an ever increasing community of educators sharing content openly, not just freely, but under copyright licences (written by Creative Commons, Free Software Foundation etc.) that let you use it, change it, distribute it and remix it.

In South Africa, Mindset has created a lot of content and I don’t think most people appreciate that it is under an open copyright licence. Add to all their content the fact that our little team at Siyavula has managed to write and edit 6 textbooks (9-12 Mathematics and Physical Science), rally volunteers around translating them plus we’ve made workbooks for all learning areas in R-9 (K-9) available in English and Afrikaans. I think there may be a greater percentage of the curriculum covered by open content in South Africa than anywhere else in the world.

Globally we’re seeing huge repositories of content become available like Wikipedia, YouTube and Slideshare which are more general tools but also more school specific ones like the Khan Academy videos, TeacherTube, Veritasium Science Videos, the PhET Simulations, CK12 Flexbooks, Curriki and of course Connexions.

So far all I’ve done is make a case for getting connected to the internet and consuming what is available!

Finally, Benefits of Sharing

The quality of this content is increasing all the time as well, especially in the cases where communities are forming. Consider the huge amount of content for Mathematics teaching Dan Meyer (algebra and geometry) has made available. The best part is that Dan releases many of his lessons on his blog where people discuss, debate and even improve them. I find the comments on Dan’s blog one of the most interesting mathematics teaching resources around (for educators at least). Consider this lesson idea posted by Dan and look at comments like this, this or even this. Thats just a random sampling. No, I’m not on a retainer from Dan, the reason I like to point at his stuff is because he made a nice 88s video explaining what it is all about for him – take a look here.

Is there only one Dan? Well yes, but there is more than one educator participating in a vibrant virtual community, sharing their content and benefiting from peer-review and an ever expanding community of practice. Not convinced, try following the any of the Blogroll links on Dan’s blog, if you’re a science educator start with Rhett Allain for some physics ideas and discussion. Each of those blogs will link to more blogs, browse around till you find the people you think are worth following.

Why is this happening? The answer is simple, peer-review in a real community works incredibly well!

But, to really benefit from a community of practice, to really harness that community to innovate around the challenges and context in which you work, you have to put your best material out there for them to see, to review and to improve and innovate around. You can’t passively watch their discussions and benefit from the full power of a community of practice. The best thing to do is to play a leading role in the community by participating and sharing on a large scale. Then the content you’re producing and the challenges you’re facing will benefit from the innovative power of the community.

You really need to be participating in a community of practice that is large and diverse enough to keep up with the rapid developments in all spheres of life so that you can provide the relevant education to your learners.

Keeping Ahead – Teaching vs. Content

Will you lose your edge? Absolutely not! In fact, this is the only way to keep your edge. Schools not participating in this process will be overtaken, firstly by the quality content that is becoming available and secondly by the rapidly changing environment for which they need to prepare learners.

The strong communities of educators have a much better chance of making sense of all the opportunities and changing technology and are too effective, too open and too innovative for the isolated schools to keep pace. Even if the schools buy the latest products from commercial publishers they’ll fall behind because of the slower pace at which publishers develop resources and the length of time they have to spend selling the content to cover their costs. Large, effective, open communities will beat them hands down.

Furthermore, I think the education you receive at one of those top schools is not defined by the content on the desk and neither is the teacher who puts it there. Those teachers identify and empathize with their students, guide them to make sense of the vast world of content, not just by acting as filters but by harnessing critical thinking and discourse. Those teachers need to fine tune, adapt and contextualise the learning experience for the needs of their specific learners. That is what will make them great educators and no matter how much content and how many ideas their community comes up with, the person who needs to take it the “last mile” is still the in-classroom educator.

A Couple of Additional Benefits

Firstly, there are, in our context, many schools where better content would still make a remarkable difference. By sharing quality resources openly, learners at those schools have opportunities to access better resources. They will never have the experience of going to a top school but everyone in the world benefits when more people have a better schooling. Doing anything to raise the bar for everyone is a worthwhile exercise.

Secondly, sharing quality resources actually increases the profile of a school. It certainly didn’t undermine MIT‘s reputation when they put up hundreds of their lectures for free online in their OpenCourseWare project.

Conclusion (Again!)

If you want to be the best you need to be up to date on all fronts and I believe that it is impossible to remain at the forefront of education if you remain in a silo, you just won’t be able to keep up.

Maybe we should be doing things radically differently anyway, if you’re bored or not at all convinced then try watching Sir Ken Robinson’s two TED talks, Do Schools Kill Creativity and Bring on the Learning Revolution.

My blog has been very quiet for the last couple of months. It is not that I’ve not had anything to blog about but rather the contrary, I’ve just been too busy. I have spent some time creating two summaries of what I’ve been up to in 2010 so you can get a sense of the bigger picture. It also shows you what has happened in the last 2 months that I just haven’t had time to blog about.

The first resource is a video where I work through my various projects and present the highlights of the year.

MarkHorner, Fellow: Open and Collaborative Resources, 2010 Summary from Shuttleworth Foundation on Vimeo.

I’ve also created a Dipity timeline that shows the activities in chronological order.

I intend to catch up on blogging about some of the activities from the last few months in more detail but the year is coming to an end and it is appropriate to present a picture of everything that has happened this year.

AMESA is the Association for Mathematics Education of South Africa, making mathematics the only school subject for which there is a national association in South Africa. I think that educators in all subject areas should have a national body that organises an annual conference to help drive their subject area as well as the professional development of educators.

I was invited to participate on a panel at the AMESA Congress this year on a panel on professional development. One of my colleagues, upon hearing this, immediately said to me “What do you know about that?”. Formally, nothing. Given the Siyavula roll-out plan, my time with the community facilitators, the research the Foundation did into teaching teachers and my time working on a big physics experiment I thought I could find something to contribute.

I went to talk about a less formal approach to professional development; more a process and environment that ensures that professional development is happening continuously rather than a paper chase for formal qualifications. A process built on things that you already know, that have already proven themselves and that harnesses the latent knowledge and experience of teachers in the field (at the chalk-face if you like). A process that will also create a sense of belonging and inclusion.

Education

Education is evolving continuously, perhaps slowly, but continuously. Need for change is becoming more urgent all the time, especially with South Africa wanting to migrate to a knowledge-based economy which will require entirely different skills from a resource-based economy.

Needs, methodologies, resources and tools are all changing as well as the circumstances in which they need to be applied. This is further complicated by the fact that a variety of circumstances need to be addressed, often simultaneously.

Not to forget the fact that at the moment, in South Africa, we are struggling to address basic numeracy and literacy needs, irrespective of your preferred economy! Taking this into account and the fact that the perfect education system is something many more developed countries are still in search of, makes a lot of educators feel like nobody has the answer and that little progress is being made.

Science

Modern science has many of the same challenges:

• constantly shifting goals,
• constantly changing methodologies, and
• no knowledge of final solution.

Yet progress is made continuously despite these obstacles – impressive and often astounding progress – everything from expanding our understanding of fundamental particles to the devices you have in your pockets that connect wirelessly through 3G, bluetooth, wifi, and more with GPS’s, cameras and radios.

How is this achieved?

All participants work tirelessly towards the goal without a well defined roadmap but rather a well-defined process of layered peer-review, continuously doing their best, testing the results and comparing methodologies etc., providing each other with constraints, ideas and challenges to continuously make progress.

In science the critical assessment of ideas is conducted in ever expanding circles of review – first local groups or departments – then workshops – then local conferences – then international conferences and then international peer-reviewed journals. It is important to not that the the informal peer review, which takes place long before formal journals, results in significant benefit and progress through critical assessment.

Professionals

Professional organisations/people continuously assess how effective they are at their core duties, continuously adapting their methodologies to be better, faster, more effective, more efficient, and more sensitive to the ever changing needs of their clients and the broader environment in which they work.

This typically happens through continuous review at all levels, personal review with a sense of personal accountability, local peer-review within their current group, department etc., institutional peer-review within their broader organisation, national peer-review at local conferences and international or global peer-review at international conferences. Then, of course, we also have peer-reviewed journals.

The many layers of review also ensure that information flows globally as well.

Groups that are effective at defining their purpose, sharing effectively and creating a communal knowledge-base of resources, ideas, methodologies and technologies are called communities of practice (COP). Scientists and other professionals typically form many layers of communities of practice.

Communities of Practice

We need to create an enabling environment for educators to form the same layered structures of communities of practice. AMESA has got half of the problem solved, they have a national congress, and have chapters in each province. What would take things to the next level would be many small grass-roots communities of practice that are affiliated with the provincial structures.

If teachers come together in an environment of trust they would be able to discuss what works and share ideas, if they consider the environment informal with no punitive measures for performance, then they can also share what doesn’t work, what they don’t understand and be more transparent about their weaknesses. This is essential if these weaknesses are to be addressed effectively, or at all.

In the current environment a lot of trust is lacking with things like classroom observation being hated because they can lead to punitive measures against under-performing teachers. It is precisely this information that needs to be shared so that we can support those teachers to overcome their weaknesses. This sort of trust is typical of a true community. The environment where teachers can receive in-classroom review, without fear, needs to be created from the policy side, or done informally by the teaching body themselves.

There really is no need to make a case for communities of practice as the benefits are well documented in many peer-reviewed journals across many disciplines. What is important to emphasise is the voluntary nature of the communities and that it is impossible to enforce their formation.

Seeds for Communities of Practice

In my work to support teachers and curriculum advisors to be more effective, I adopt an approach that focuses on the use of Open Educational Resources (OERs), which immediately allows for the re-packaging, contextualisation and improvement of educational resources, by communities of practice, which supports load-sharing, professional development, empowerment and the development of a sense of belonging for the participants.

To do this effectively we need to support the communities in ways that are reinforcing and this is done by providing a suite of complementary projects that support the essence of the full teaching value chain:

Wrapping communities of practice around an open, collaborative approach to sharing content, knowledge, ideas, techniques and challenges will have benefits for all the participants and provide opportunities for development. Using technology appropriately will allow processes and communities of practice to co-exist at many levels. For example, teachers could participate in the local community of practice for their geographical area, as well as a provincial community of practice and then also a national one.

The bottom-line is that participation in a community of practice is an incredibly powerful driver for continuous professional development.

On the 22^nd and 23^rd February, the Siyavula team ran a workshop at the ATKV Buffelspoort for Mathematics and Languages Subject Advisors for the North West Province’s Department of Education. This workshop was a joint undertaking in partnership with the Department of Education. They are providing the venue and catering as well as coordinating attendance.

The workshop was well attended with 50 subject advisors (also often called curriculum advisors) participating. We were missing some of the Mathematics advisors, as there was a parallel mathematics workshop elsewhere, but are expecting them to attend our next workshop.

Technical / Content Training

From the team’s side the event was a resounding success. On the technical front the stand-alone server and wireless network worked extremely well and we were able to conduct our training with more fluidity and focus than in previous workshops where internet access challenges had proved a large distraction.

A particular highlight of the opening technical session, our hula-hoop activity in which we explain all the Connexions concepts with rope, books and hula-hoops, was when one of the advisors pointed out that this was the ideal technical approach for realising the objectives of the outcomes-based national curriculum.

Community Building

The community-related activities of this workshop were different from our previous Siyavula workshops in that we focused our discussion more on what it takes to support a community as well as giving the participants an opportunity to discuss and present their own strategies for taking things forward. Subject advisors support many teachers in a learning area so they are in a superb position to create an enabling environment for communities to form.

The formation of communities, and ultimately communities of practice, amongst the teachers they support will have many benefits beyond improved sharing of content, classroom-practice, and ideas. Communities of practice provide a powerful support structure for participants as well as being a powerful vehicle for professional development. Subject advisors that are able to support the formation of communities of practice will automatically be working towards their mandate for curriculum delivery in the classroom.

Many of the advisors asked for more information, material and training sessions on how communities work and how best to support them, another highlight of the workshop.

The Way Forward

The participant had many group discussions on various topics. In the final session where they were discussing the way forward the groups unanimously identified the following needs:

• department support,
• recognition for participants,
• resources, and
• senior managment team (SMT) support.

The particularly exciting part was that all groups committed to:

• distributing the workbooks using the provided DVDs,
• introducing their teachers to Connexions, and
• supporting their teachers to form communities.

The participants remained engaged and enthusiastic right up until the end and my favourite piece of feedback during the closing session was when one subject advisor said it was the first workshop he’d been to where everyone had stayed until the very end.

Special thanks to Quinton Davis for all the photographs, click on any of them to browse the full set on flickr

The goal of Siyavula is to ensure that teachers in South Africa have access to a comprehensive set of free and open educational resources that are curriculum-aligned and sustainable. Key to the effective roll-out of such a project is ensuring that the project aligns with the needs and realities on the ground.

How is Siyavula going to achieve its goal?

The short answer is we will enable the appropriate use of technology to support the formation of new and enhance the process of existing communities of practice of teachers that share, adapt, develop, enhance and redistribute resources.

A simple schematic of the education system shows how the curriculum is determined by the Department of Education (DoE) and then propagates through the provinces, districts and ultimately to the Curriculum Advisors who are charged with ensuring and supporting its delivery in the classroom. When we look at the landscape of teachers we find that the majority of teachers feel overwhelmed by the task ahead of them. Issues like insufficient support, resources or training contribute to this and makes them feel isolated.

We do find groups of teachers (communities of practice) that come together to share resources, discuss curriculum and content and support each other. These groups swap and share information, resources and support. One notable feature of these groups is that they often seem to be formed by reasonably well-resourced teachers, so the access to resources is not the sole driver for their existence, and the sharing of information and support is important too. Sharing is fundamental to teaching and a core part of teachers’ values.
To enhance the effectiveness of groups and support the isolated teachers, given the the ideas Siyavula is building on, we need to provide:

This will allow Siyavula to create a framework that supports the education system. The framework needs to accept the curriculum, allow swap-and-share groups the ability to share resources and have the discussions they need, allow users like Curriculum Advisors to vet resources and ensure that the isolated teachers can get access to the resources.

One of the beautiful features of using a web-based platform to support the sharing is that the teachers who are creating material aren’t impacted by others downloading it whereas, with paper resources, they’d need to produce extra copies, transport them and actually push their content out. Now the resources can be accessed when and as needed with no extra work required by the original author.

To support as many teachers as possible from the launch of the project, Siyavula has acquired a set of curriculum resources which teachers can use, adapt, print and enhance in addition to adding their own resources to the project. The material that Siyavula has acquired so far covers:

• Foundation phase – workbooks for all learning areas in English and Afrikaans
• Intermediate phase – workbooks for all learning areas in English and Afrikaans
• Senior phase – workbooks for all learning areas in English and Afrikaans
• FET phase – textbooks for Physical Science and Mathematics

The acquisition and sharing of this content allows Siyavula to engage with teachers as a sharing partner, in contrast to seeking donations of content in good faith or adopting a pure advocacy role.

Over time isolated teachers will also begin to share resources back, ensuring that their latent knowledge, especially around context challenges, starts to be shared, and then either form their own communities or join existing ones so that we eventually have communities of practice that are adapting and enhancing resources for all the imaginable contexts that exist within the South African education system. The wide variety of contexts is something that the traditional publishing model is unlikely to address and requires very localised and specific knowledge. This enabling feature of OERs is likely to have even more of an impact than the cost savings that are possible.

I talk a lot about communities of practice (CoP) in my work around Siyavula and the concept is key to the strategy and sustainability. Before talking about why we chose Connexions, our community strategy or the impact of the recent announcement by the Minister of Basic Education I need to make sure we’ve got a definition of CoPs handy. I would like to emphasise what CoPs are, their benefits and what they are not.

Communities of Practice

CoP research was pioneered by Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave and Etienne has a nice, succinct definiton on his CoP page which I’ll reproduce here:

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.

CoPs have:

• a domain or area in which all members share an interest,
• members engage in discussion and activities, helping each other and sharing information and
• members who are practitioners and develop a shared set of resources, knowledge, experience, tool and techniques.

In working with teachers there is ample opportunity to support the formation of communities of practice. Teachers have a common domain, they can benefit from discussion and sharing information and their shared experience, tools and techniques will improve classroom practice. In fact, it has been shown (see for example: Zaslavsky, O., & Leikin, R. (2004)  Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, 7, 5 – 32 and Graven, M. (2005) Pythagoras, 61, 2 – 10) that participating in communities of practice is a powerful form of professional development for teachers.

There has been a lot written on CoPs and I’m not going to delve into it here, what I do want to mention are a few anecdotes related to what communities of practice are not.

Forced Groups

I often suggest that people consider working together with the hope that a community of practice will emerge and this is often met with the standard refrain “One person ends up doing all the work!”. My own experience is similar. When forced to work in a group for projects one person often ended up doing all the work (I’m not even going to pretend it was me).

However, forced group-work failing is not a counter-argument to CoPs being useful. It is merely an illustration that you can’t force people to be a community. My own feeling about forced group-work is that nobody wants to be there, the group dynamics haven’t ironed themselves out yet, nobody feels comfortable and the pressure builds up until someone just wants out. After a while this behaviour is reinforced sufficiently that someone takes on the task as soon as the group forms and none of the group workings are ever sorted out.

Rapid Deployment

CoPs are communities, no matter which group development process you favour, all teams or communities grow and this takes time. The Forming – Storming – Norming – Performing process, proposed by Bruce Tuckman, is one well known example of how the process has been categorised. What is important is that there is an organic process a group of people have to experience before they perform (i.e. they are a community, never mind a community of practice).

The challenge here is that even if an organisation has bought into the idea of communities, they take time to evolve and not all are successful. It is impossible to include communities as deliverables on a timeline. The harder you try the more frustrated you are likely to become.

Purpose

Communities consist of people, it’d be much easier, if much more boring, to manage them if they didn’t, but they do. So, assuming we get some people together and they overcome their group dynamics, achieve the ability to communicate effectively, share ideas, information and even criticism, they still need a purpose to bring them together to be community of practice. The thing about people is that they want to be able to choose.

If people are going to find the time and energy to participate, to overcome the group dynamics, accept and give criticism, then they need to resonate with the purpose of community. The easiest way to achieve this is to allow the communities to decide their own purpose. You will probably also have to accept that their purpose isn’t going to be identical to the one you’d like them to have.

Forcing a group together to immediately work on something they’re not interested in is clearly going to be a disaster. For success we have to rectify all the mistakes in that process, not just one of them. So if we’re somehow going to use CoPs in our work we need to keep this and much, much more in mind. With a lot of help from Hélène Smit, Layo Seriki and Judith Haupt,  I do try but I’ll save the details for another blog post.