Learning Alliances

Microsoft Social Computing Symposium 2005 position statement

I got an invitation to the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium 2005, April 25-26. Here's the "position statement" I submitted:

Looking at social technologies from the perspective of active communities is rather different than looking at them from a marketplace perspective, or the perspective of a vendor. Communities typically straddle multiple technologies, characteristically carrying out certain activities on one platform and switching or migrating to another platform for other activities over time. Their reliance on any one technology (or mix of technologies) for thinking and being together changes over time, not only in response to the availability of new technologies on the landscape, but as a result of evolving membership, the evolution of individual and group competence, and the evolution of the community's domain itself.

There is a fundamentally improvisational aspect to this straddling and it turns out that an improvisational lens on how communities self-organize and build on available technology platforms is useful and unconventional. Sawyer (2001) positions conversational improvisation between a social and psychological level, and that's precisely this level at which new learning occurs in a community of practice; it's as if learning is a conversation between these two levels. Our thinking about technologies has been stuck on a psychological level, however. As we (Wenger, White, Smith, and Rowe) look at actual communities of practice for our new technology study, we find that they are simultaneously negotiating domain, practice, and community and that each facet has implications for the mix of technologies that a community uses to be together. We are finding new social roles in these communities and new functions that need to be supported by technologies.

Just as a community of practice perspective on learning and identity has implications for the use and therefore for the design of technologies (Smith, 2004), an improvisational perspective has implications for how communities are seen and cultivated. Community leadership in particular requires new tools for visualizing the connections, practices, and knowledge of a community. Most of the tools designed for community representation or leadership assume a one-platform kind of life-style which is easier for a designer to think about, but ultimately not helpful for community leaders. Without new tools for visualizing communities, the sense of community identity that a community leader works to support tends to be more static and backward-looking than it need be.

The work reported here draws on several different kinds of contact with communities of practice in very different cultural and technological settings. As a technologist I have been a tool builder who observes how new technology resources are appropriated by specific communities over time. As an organizer of community meetings and learning events in various communities, I have been careful to mix social and technical innovation without allowing either one to dominate. As I have recently been systematically gathering stories from the lives of many different communities who have switched platforms, brought in new members, or seen their topic morph over time, my thinking has changed from a technology-centric perspective to a community-centric perspective.