Communities of Practice in Practice: Frequency, Formality and Fun.

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What’s been clear since the pandemic is that we attend WAY too many meetings. The feeling of formality, the inclusion of agendas and the general waste of time that meetings tend to result in is an unspoken truth that many of our leaders are still oblivious to.

“This could have been an email”
– 99% of meeting attendees.

When it comes to learning new things and engaging with new ideas, formality might have its place, but in higher education, especially in university settings, formality may be over-done. So let’s have a look at the 3F’s of community of practice engagement – Formality, Frequency and Fun.

Formality

Agendas, Minutes, Roberts Rules of Order and other formal meeting conventions have their place, but if you want folks to feel like they have ownership and investment in a space or group of people, it can’t be too formal – this is what working groups, committees, and boards are for. In a Community of Practice (CoP), it generally works better to have an informal approach, sourcing questions, having a chat, and getting into what is interesting to the CoP’s members. This is especially true when you’re dealing with academic staff or professors who are usually one of a few people in the world with their expertise. In a previous role as Director of eLearning (this was a few years ago now), I used to hold something called ‘Lunchtime Tech Chat’ and that’s exactly what it was. People would show up with their bagged lunches, and we’d just talk about educational technology – what they were using, what they were perhaps frustrated with, and what we could help each other with – and this is the key. A CoP is usually not a formal training session, but a gathering of a group of people with similar vested interests, who can help each other out. It’s that simple.

Now, you can have informal CoP’s and you can have formal CoP’s too – these are usually facilitated from the top-down, with a specific aim in mind. Want to get everyone on board with a specifici process or software they need to learn? CoP. Done. This can still have formal elements, but can be a guided experience where people still help each other out, while working towards a goal. The difference between this and a more open, less formal CoP would be that this one has an expiry date. When the goal is achieved, the CoP no longer needs to exist. I led a CoP like this back at the University of British Columbia a few years back (I think technically it had to be a ‘user group’ due to governance and terms of reference requirements). In this CoP / user group, our members were all people tasked with helping with a transition from one LMS to another – in this case, Moodle, to Canvas. As Canvas has a robust API system for interacting with the platform through the command line, we set up a CoP to share our ideas, practices and our code, so that everyone could work more effectively. It was a fantastic community full of senior software engineers, as well as student workers, and what I loved about it was that all ideas were equal, with most of the student workers’ stuff shared more widely. When the migration was complete, the CoP didn’t need to exist anymore and was slowly wound down. It was a great experience – I learned a lot about Python, and it was my first introduction to git, which I still use to this day.

So whether formal, informal, with an expiry date, or without CoPs can be super useful, simply because they are not meetings.

Frequency

So how often should a CoP meet? I’d say AT LEAST once a month, if not more frequently. If you meet less than every month, then items are forgotten, people don’t form connections, and the community aspect of the Community of Practice starts to fall apart. When you think about communities we have in our lives, these are all based on a sense of familiarity and comfort (which links into the first F above). Sure, we all have friends we don’t talk to all the time, but our long-term friendships are usually deep enough that when we catch up, it’s like no time has passed. With work-based relationships, we aren’t that close, so to get closer, to get more comfortable with each other and to learn about what we’re all working on, this needs regularity and more frequency, otherwise we’re just showing up to a space where we don’t know everyone and we don’t remember what we talked about last time. Time to review your minutes I guess…

Frequency can also tie into something that doesn’t start with F – Headcount. How big should a CoP be? I was recently added to a Microsoft Teams…team (don’t get me started), that was labelled as a CoP. I think it’s met twice in the last year and that teams space is a ghost town, though it has something like 100 members. It’s not a living breathing space, but a placeholder of communication where no communication happens. It does have a lot of files in the files section though 😉.

So CoPs shouldn’t be that big, and if they are, this can dilute the conversation, ensuring that only those who are confident speaking up do so, leaving many others to feel sidelined, and effectually not part of a COMMUNITY, which is what it’s supposed to be. If you want to set up a real community, break a large group into smaller ones, with similar interests and let them go from there. In this case, a Hub and Spoke model would work, with downwards and upwards communication so everyone can learn across these sub-communities, while still meeting every month or every couple of weeks.

I’ve even seen situations where subgroup members could attend other communities as they liked, to ‘float’ around so to speak.

Fun

At some point along the journey of formal education systems, the F word was lost, and learning became a transactional chore, one in which we do work we’re not super invested in, in exchange for a grade / mark that tells us we’re real humans, worthy of a job or of respect.

CoPs absolutely should not be based on any model of structured formal education, but be a space (physical or virtual) that folks want to show up to. It should be interesting, exciting, and challenging to be a part of, one in which everyone is able to share their ideas, ask questions, work towards goals, or just sit back and listen. Most of all, it should be a fun space for members, so that they keep coming back. For my Lunchtime Tech Chats, I always had props – new educational technologies for folks to play with and explore, while we talked. These served as informal prompts, that piqued the interest of members and helped to ground innovative tools and approaches in the work being done by the professors who came.

And this is a key element to fun – relevance. If what you’re discussing in a CoP is not relevant to everyone, they’ll simply stop coming. This is also linked to formality, wherein if the agenda is set by leadership who aren’t invested, and the agenda set isn’t interesting or sourced by the members, then what do we have? A meeting.

Check out the book below from Wenger et al. There is so much research on CoPs in practice – this has just been a reflection of my own experiences after reading a few papers on the subject. Now go out and don’t call meetings, but build communities!

References

Wenger, E., McDermott, R., & Snyder, W. M. (2002). Cultivating communities of practice: A guide to managing knowledge. Harvard Business Press.


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