I recently finished reading Digital Habitats: Stewarding technology for communities by Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John D. Smith. It’s a gem of a book in large part because of the three authors’ deep expertise in communities-of-practice. But they are also models, in my mind, of what it means to be reflective practitioners. There is much how-to in this book, but the how-too is deeply rooted in why and context.
The book is largely designed to aid practitioners who are the technology stewards for the communities-of-practice they serve. It is filled with very practical tips for stewardship, from selecting or matching the right technologies for the community’s needs, to taking the pulse of the community’s readiness to adopt new technologies, and to managing the change process.
One of the highlights of the book for me is the discussion on the different orientations that communities tend to use for learning together.
Communities learn together in different ways: some meet regularly, some converse online, some work together, some share documents, some develop deep bonds and some are driven by the mission they serve. We say that these communities have different orientations toward the process of learning together. An orientation is a typical pattern of activities and connections through which members experience being a community. - From Digital Habits, p. 69
The authors then go on to define and describe nine different orientations (and these are not mutually exclusive): meetings; open-ended conversations; projects; content; access to expertise; relationships; individual participation; community cultivation; and serving a context (e.g., inside a single organization, cross-organization, public mission, etc.). For each orientation, the authors define community activities that are clues to the orientation; “signs of life” indicating the orientation is healthy; key success factors; questions to consider; and technology implications.
Outside of the attention to detail paid to unpacking these orientations, what I am struck by is how useful these orientations are in providing a language for “what we are seeing” — in the sense of ethnographic observation. One of the challenges that we all deal with in defining how work (or shared interest) activities really get done is in respecting the social, nonlinear, complex, situated nature of the actual practice of these activities. Through these nine orientations, the Digital Habitat authors provide a very workable language for helping to better understand communities-of-practice as the really are, and then to translate that understanding into solutions to ensure the “signs of life” within the community are strong.
So, Jeff,
Your praise of the orientations scheme in our book is very pleasing. Especially the part about ““what we are seeing” — in the sense of ethnographic observation….“.
Could you say more about that? I think it’s a very important point but to do us any good we need to really put these orientations to work. We need to talk about what we can see or how we can observe more systematically WITH them than without them.
I remember many years ago reading something John W. Tukey wrote about how as a chemist you needed to know something about a sample before you began to analyze it (e.g., whether it was a blood sample or not). He was saying that the same applies to data analysis: is a batch of data a time series or collected in some other way. I remember being quite discouraged by that statement. Thirty years later it seems very wise. If the community orientations we talk about in Digital Habitats help us observe more effectively or mis-perceive less frequently, they will have served their purpose.
But we need to put them to work to verify whether they help us focus or whether they hide important features of community life.
Thanks, John
Appreciate the comment. Sounds like we’re looking at this in exactly the same way (which is certainly comforting for me).
I picked up Digital Habitats to evaluate as a textbook for a graduate course I teach at Northwestern; so I primarily had my teaching hat on when reading the chapter on orientations. I think your comparison to “knowing something about a sample” is spot-on. The course I teach is an something of an introduction to KM for non-KM business/nonprofit professionals, but we end up spending most of our time talking about observing and assessing; what’s going on here? We know we’ve been effective in using models or frameworks as aids in observing when the grad students come back to class and say, “you know, I just noticed something in my organization this week after our discussion in class…” and they go on to describe how they’ve fine-tuned their observation skills.
So I can definitely see real potential in using the orientations as a way to observe more effectively — and frankly, be very explicit about that objective. “Putting them to work,” as you suggest, might very well be an outcome of introducing them in the course. We often inspire new projects with organizational partners based on the concepts and ideas we first introduce in class.
Same goes for work I do as a practitioner. Certainly has me thinking.
There are two programs that have used Digital Habitats as a text. You might compare notes with them since our book makes sense in the context of an effort to turn the classroom inside out (or bring experience and practice from the outside into the classroom conversations in a meaningful way).
First Margaret Riel and Paul Sparks at Pepperdine: http://mindmaps.wikispaces.com/c-12+Action+Research
Second is Kathy Millhauser at City University of Seattle: http://technologyforcommunities.com/2010/05/digital-habitats-for-project-teams/
Would love to see what you do with these ideas.