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CPsquare Member Blogs

CPsquare, the community of practice on communities of practice, is a global professional association of people who participate in, lead, study, and support communities of practice.

New Year’s Resolution—I Am EnoughJanuary 1

Year after year I make New Year’s Resolutions for change. I have numbered them, listed them on paper, entered them into Outlook pop-ups, carried them in my pockets, put them around on Post-Its, told people about them, kept them close if they were personal, repeated them as a mantra, and other methods that have been forgotten just as the resolutions themselves have.

This year, I am planning something different. Rather than try for change, I am going to do just the opposite—accept what already is.

With my appreciation for Reflective Practice as a disciplinary methodology and my need to blog to help realize the results and the process itself, I am sharing my thinking on this resolution this year.

My resolution is a mantra I have tried out for the past few days and it feels right for me. It seems to fit in a way that I can understand and will try to incorporate into my life. In this regard, I understand I Am Enough as meaning that I will focus on appreciating what I have, already am, have accomplished, think, and feel. For some background, I at times think about what I am not or have not done or thought or felt, more than what I am, have done, thought, or felt. I tend to apologize (at least to myself) for my omissions and lack of, rather than app

Jeffrey’s Twitter Updates for 2008-12-31December 31 2008

Took a class tonight - Intro to Crochet. How challenging!!! #
Working late tonight; so time to go grab some coffee. #
Finished my last meeting of the day. #
Yumm; Veggie Delite. #
Getting a healthy sandwich at Subway. #

Formalizing stories about community leadershipDecember 31 2008

I'm working with several meta-communities: communities of practice made up of people who are themselves supporting communities. Of course CPsquare is very much my “main meta-community” but I'm a bit surprised at how these meta-communities are turning up. (I guess I shouldn't be, since that's where I started 10 years ago working to get a meta-community going at StorageTek.)

Talking about communities of practice can be pretty tricky, straining the patience of the action-oriented folks if it goes on too long and making the analytical types anxious if conversations get too loose. These communities face a raft of issues about leadership, technology, boundaries, and purpose. In a couple of these meta-communities I've introduced the concept of regular “experiments”, borrowing an idea in Derby and Larsen's Agile retrospectives. (They aren't talking about communities of practice, but in a way that's what their book is about.) Collective experiments are a useful activity no matter what a community's domain might be, but with a CoP meta-community the can be especially helpful.

Here are some of the questions that come up in meta communities, all of which are in some way a matter of balancing opposites:

What exactly are our goals as community leaders? Is it legitimate to find new goals as we go and if so, how do we do that? Could we develop richer and more useful frameworks to evaluate our selves and our work?

If we're t

Best of Beth's Blog 2008: Finding The Top Ten Posts In Less Than Five MInutes!December 31 2008

One of the things I've been wanting to do for a while is review my blog content for the year and select the "Top 10" posts or the "best of" posts. Once a year in June, I do an overall benchmarking and ROI analysis of my blog using particular metrics. But, a top ten post would focus on the content itself - and also jump start some thinking that I need to do for a redesign of this blog.

I use a variety of tools for this analysis, including Google Analytics, Feedburner subscriber counts, and manually tracking comment to post ratios (typepad doesn't have a nifty plugin like wordpress to automate that grunge work)

A tool that use to evlauate my content is PostRank. It takes your RSS feed and applies engagement metrics, analyzing the types and frequency of an audience's interaction with your content. Each blog post is given a score from 1 to 10, representing how interesting and relevant people have found your content. The more interesting or relevant an item is, the more work they will do to share or respond to that item so interactions that require more effort are weighted higher.

PostRank scoring is based on analysis of the "5 Cs" of engagement: creating, critiquing, chatting, collecting, and clicking. It uses sources such as how many delicious bookmarks, incomi

A Roundup of New Year's Predictions, Resolutions, and Best Of 2008December 31 2008

Flickr Photo from Bearman 2007

It's that quiet week between Christmas and New Years. Lots of time for reflection and to write that end of year post. Ah, but what format to use. It boils down to two choices: gaze into your crystal ball and predict the future or look back at the year just ending for the best (or worst) moments.

Last year, I couldn't decide and ended up writing the look back as a lessons learned, a personal New Year's resolution post, and a round up of what nonprofit folks had on their minds as they entered 2008:

Four Lessons Learned: Social Media and Nonprofits Meme: I listed four lessons learned and tagged four other people.

New Year's Resolution: Get Rid of that Pile of E-Waste: I researched the best ways to recycle the pile of computers and geeky stuff lying around my office and cleaned my desk.

Round up of New Year's Reflections, Best Ofs, and Predictions for 2008

This year, I decided to create a New Year's post that looks at both format