We’ve been playing with the idea of “community of interest” for some time at WebJunction, beginning with our fabulous Spanish Language Outreach and Rural Library Sustainability projects, and branching out into other groups, most recently the very exciting Government Information in the 21st Century project–still in its early stages, but expect wonderful materials to show up on the site very soon.
(And by the way, the new “Groups” box on our cleaned-up home page will make projects like these much easier to access than they used to be.)
Our site partners too (with three new states coming on board soon) operate as communities of interest, mostly geographically defined (but not always: see our Equal Access partner site).
But in musing recently on “Communities of Interest” I came across an alternative term, one that helped clarify my thinking about WebJunction a bit: “Community of Practice”. Though new to me, it is in fact a well-known concept in the organizational development field (here’s a nice Wikipedia article).
So what makes this important to WebJunction? Here’s Etienne Wenger, who helped coin the term:
A community of practice is not merely a community of interest–people who like certain kinds of movies, for instance. Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems�in short a shared practice.
I like the focus and utility that this concept brings: I’ve always wanted WJ to become a place where people *get stuff done*: working together on public access computing or service to Spanish speakers or government information.
Don’t get me wrong: WJ is a great place to come and get smarter, have your questions answered, and boost your general professional skills. It’s also a good place to build relationships around the many topics that are germane to the many facets of librarianship. But (my bias) the more we can facilitate your participation in communities of practice–enabling you to connect with others to synergistically develop your *practice*, the things you do every day and care about over time, around which you build your career and your job satisfaction (and ultimately, your identity)–the more our potential as a powerful collaborative platform can really start to shine forth.
A while ago a WJ job candidate pointed out that we used the word “community” about seven times, in seven different ways, on our home page (thankfully, the issue has been retired with our refresh). So maybe we don’t need yet another spin on “community” here. But I’m really intrigued by the “CoP” notion.
(Some may accuse me of a subliminal response to the control/authority element suggested by the acronym “CoP”, as opposed to the flirty and somewhat oriental flavor of “CoI”. But I hope the reflection stands on its own merits.)
Hi Joe,
Let me reassure you, so far in webjunction you have built a really good community of practice. You’ve looked at how things have been done in physical libraries since Melvil started to classify their contents and put them on shelves, so communities of interest could find the information they were after. In this regards Werjunction it appears, has been a raging success. The eteaching of your COP’s seems very successful.
But if we are talking about your COP’s communities of interest, then I’d have to say Webjunction is about as successful as any librarian COP initiative. It’s a dismal failure. The numbers of “the interested” attending the WJ board from the WORD WIDE web prove this point. Don’t worry you don’t have much competition.
If you were interested in making WJ a junction for librarians, and their COInterest, on the Web, the idea of which got me SO excited years ago, then let me make a few suggestions.
Look to your communities of practice in the first place, sure. They’re all over the world. I’ll just point to a few progressives.
http://www.sociallibraries.com/course/about
http://librarianavengers.org/?page_id=3
http://wikis.ala.org/emergingleaders/index.php/Main_Page
and a few conservatives who like WJ think the world wide web revolves a single web site or blog.
http://communities.ala.org/Home/tabid/36/ctl/Login/Default.aspx?num=0&ReturnUrl=http%3a%2f%2fcommunities.ala.org%2fDefault.aspx
http://forums.oclc.org/idealbb/default.asp
and reachout, and be seen to be communicating.
I’m so frustrated with the lack of imagination inside the OCLC monster and it’s babies. You see, i was expecting WJ to be something like this; an online “environment” for global communites with similar interests in seeing libraries prosper, who are scattered around remote domains. A place where global communities would, with guidance, share their elearning. http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/ and attract (like sitepoint, around 180k visitors daily.)
A place where a global team would support the answering of global similar questions (in addition to the local ones).
And that it would, as good librarians, classify things in their rightful place – E.g A spanish outreach programme which is not centered around an .es domain indeed!
Whereas it’s become another primarily ‘me too’ domain where COP’s only talk about their own professions practices from yesterday and how they’re so underfunded. You really don’t seem to need “another spin” on community. Too many others COP’s are already doing this. Like the Avenging librarian, I really do believe COI’s should “fall to your knees and worship a librarian”. But only if he/she can help them find a global community of practice that they have an interest in, not just the one librarians have an interest in.
The greatest pity from my perspective is that librarians have this wonderful classification tool to work and simply won’t adapt it to the web. i.e This page is misclassified.
http://ddc.typepad.com/. It should be http://www.025.431.edu in the US, and http://www.025.421.edu.au in Australia, and http://www.025.431.ac.uk in the UK. If it were, the grid people could start stringing the nodes together.
Thanks for letting me get this off my chest.
Hi Joe,
Let me reassure you, so far in webjunction you have built a really good community of practice. You’ve looked at how things have been done in physical libraries since Melvil started to classify their contents and put them on shelves, so communities of interest could find the information they were after. In this regards Werjunction it appears, has been a raging success. The eteaching of your COP’s seems very successful.
But if we are talking about your COP’s communities of interest, then I’d have to say Webjunction is about as successful as any librarian COP initiative. It’s a dismal failure. The numbers of “the interested” attending the WJ board from the WORD WIDE web prove this point. Don’t worry you don’t have much competition.
If you were interested in making WJ a junction for librarians, and their COInterest, on the Web, the idea of which got me SO excited years ago, then let me make a few suggestions.
Look to your communities of practice in the first place, sure. They’re all over the world. I’ll just point to a few progressives.
http://www.sociallibraries.com/course/about
http://librarianavengers.org/?page_id=3
http://wikis.ala.org/emergingleaders/index.php/Main_Page
and a few conservatives who like WJ think the world wide web revolves a single web site or blog.
http://communities.ala.org/Home/tabid/36/ctl/Login/Default.aspx?num=0&ReturnUrl=http%3a%2f%2fcommunities.ala.org%2fDefault.aspx
http://forums.oclc.org/idealbb/default.asp
and reachout, and be seen to be communicating.
I’m so frustrated with the lack of imagination inside the OCLC monster and it’s babies. You see, i was expecting WJ to be something like this; an online “environment” for global communites with similar interests in seeing libraries prosper, who are scattered around remote domains. A place where global communities would, with guidance, share their elearning. http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/ and attract (like sitepoint, around 180k visitors daily.)
A place where a global team would support the answering of global similar questions (in addition to the local ones).
And that it would, as good librarians, classify things in their rightful place – E.g A spanish outreach programme which is not centered around an .es domain indeed!
Whereas it’s become another primarily ‘me too’ domain where COP’s only talk about their own professions practices from yesterday and how they’re so underfunded. You really don’t seem to need “another spin” on community. Too many others COP’s are already doing this. Like the Avenging librarian, I really do believe COI’s should “fall to your knees and worship a librarian”. But only if he/she can help them find a global community of practice that they have an interest in, not just the one librarians have an interest in.
The greatest pity from my perspective is that librarians have this wonderful classification tool to work and simply won’t adapt it to the web. i.e This page is misclassified.
http://ddc.typepad.com/. It should be http://www.025.431.edu in the US, and http://www.025.421.edu.au in Australia, and http://www.025.431.ac.uk in the UK. If it were, the grid people could start stringing the nodes together.
Thanks for letting me get this off my chest.
PS. I’ve just pushed the Submit button. But there’s nothing to tell me my tirade has been sent. Just so you know.
Hi Simon,
First, I’m sorry you had to post your comment twice. We just moved our blog to a new server and there are some odd things going on.
Lots of stimulating ideas, as usual. I don’t quite understand what a “community of practice’s community of interest” is, so I can’t quite penetrate the heart of what you’re saying. Can you clarify?
Thanks,
Joe
No problem, Received no mail from this blog either which is why I haven’t been back til now. &*%*% software!
OK, I’m an outsider who looks at OCLC communities’ stuff, especially their use of the Dewey Code. I don’t want to get involved in being a librarian, although i see librarians are crucial in putting some shape on Information and Communication Networks, particularly as their different (IP)protocols converge. So I’ll never be a member of your community of practice, But I’ll always be one of your COP’s community of interest. And the same could be said for many others.
The main difference in our mindsets is that while oCLC’s COP’s will look backwards & say, “we’re in the Library (the info) business”, I know your COP’s are in the Media business. The proof is in all the web sites, and blogs like this (as examples), that OCLC has set up.
Meanwhile, the old telephone guys (the Comms COP’s) do the same thing. Looking backwards they say, “We’re in the Comms business”. But you only have to do a search on the ‘Accessgrid’ to see that’s this is not true either. They’re in the media business too. They record their global programmes and bury them somewhere because they don’t like talking to librarian COP’s.
The common ‘join’ is the new ICT architecture called grids, where, for example, your COP, when doing a Spanish Outreach programme, would set up a site at (say) Webjunction.es and link between this node and that. Once you start thinking this way, in global grids as opposed to national websites, then you have to think about how do you make it easy for each language group to find their natural portal. The dewey code is fantastic for this as it’s translated into so many languages. You could start by classifying the portals in each country as (say) http://www.025.431.org & http://www.025.431.es (instead of something meaningless like http://ddc.typepad.com/) which would support a global grid environment of your COP’s). And if anyone walked into a library anywhere in the world, from your community of interest, looking for your COP’s global environment, it would be pretty intuitive, regardless of language, to point them in the right direction. And if you do it for your own COP, you could do it for any other.
It would also help many global initiatives like this to stop reinventing the wheel and be more sustainable. http://diligentproject.org/
cheers, simon