As a prelude, I must mention that the most significant thing is of course the community itself, both longer term hosts and temporary guests, all of whom I found to be genuinely open and welcoming which enabled me to make myself at home and join in easily.

1) The story about community developing around the nptech tag

Reading through Beth Kanter’s H20 playlist allowed me to see the shape of how this process unfolded, thus bringing a whole new idea into my mind. It is significant because once this possibility is understood, then the senses are alerted to the pattern and may be able to spot opportunities for intervening to help a similar process along. The elegance in the naming of the evolved tag name “nptech” compared with the more contrived “COP+maven” used in the excercise is probably a significant sucess factor and perhaps sheds some light on the disadvantages of both “DAR” and “distributedactionresearch” as tags.

2) Wiki barn raising concept. I’ve already written about this, but it’s perhaps worth documenting the learning process. By the time the session “early life of a wiki” came along, there was already a lot going on at the conference and at first I overlooked it. The case history of the NVC wiki day didn’t appear directly relevant. Reading the transcript of the telephone chat, I noted that the wiki launch made use of multiple channels and that the invitation called it a barn raising and turned it into an event. I began to become a little bit intrigued and later mentioned the term to Linda, who remembered that there was something abot barn raising on the meatball wiki. So the combination of online reading and offline conversation about another space reinforced the pattern and motivated me to look into it further. I then shared the connection by posting the meatball wiki link to CP2 where it was met with further encouragment. The concept of Barn Raising has since become an important supplement to my exhibition strategy and the meatball wiki community a significant node in my network.

3) Discussion engine.

This is a development of the old competition between forums and threaded discussions. The social software used by CPsquare is Webcrossing and my first impressions were quickly overcome with a recognition of some well thought out features. The absence of an automatically inserted subject “Re: ” is a good thing because it pevents the inevitable inappropriate headers and topic drift which occurs in all threaded discussions despite the best conscious intentions, and the practice it encourages is to reflect briefly on the reply you are just about to post in order to sum it up succinctly in a subject heading. This simple feature alone is a major improvement on previous systems and I notice that it is also implemented in some other modern web forums.

4) Better understanding of the nature and implications of mashups and COP2.o )

Four points are enough for now, much more will be revealed to me as I go through a consolidation process of reflecting on the discussions at the Action Research fringe event and on my own extracted contributions to the wider conference.

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“There are two ways of forming a CoP (I say two ’cause I don’t believe in the third, the “built” one)”

and also seems to contradict Bill Bruck’s (of www.q2learning.com) view that “blogs will be able to be used for their strength – personal publishing with commentary; and threaded discussion for its strength – group interaction. ”

Stephen’s Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~

Harold Jarche cites Jay Cross, who remarks en passant, “After the session, several people told me they really appreciated Bill telling it like it is. Early on, he said that while he thought he was pretty good at fostering online communities, 90% of the communities he sets up fail.” Bill probably is good at setting up online communities. But I wonder whether a community that has been set up is doomed to fail. I wonder whether, instead, what we should be looking at as community is the interactions between people in a distributed environment – such as the network of blogs and readers and commenters that make up what might be called the edublogging community (actually several communities, but I digress). A seminar, a meeting space, an online discussion board – these are not communities. They may be a place the community meets, but if the community doesn’t have a life outside these spaces, it will not survive for long in them.

Two quick thoughts of my own:

1) Problems with the proposed depiction of communities as networks of loosely connected bloggers are that they are difficult to make explicit, analyse or demonstrate value from. And some of the heat in this developing discussion which breaks out from time to time, perhaps comes from the dawning reality that such communities may offer few opportunities for professional facilitators.

2) One of the implications of the 90% failure statistic is that 10% do not.

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