Lecture 15
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| Wisdom is not the product of schooling but the lifelong attempt to acquire it. - Albert Einstein |
Communities of Practice and Communities of Interest
Gerhard Fischer, Hal Eden, and Holger Dick — Fall Semester 2010
gerhard@colorado.edu; haleden@colorado.edu; holger.dick@gmail.com;
October 13, 2010
Paper: Fischer, G., & Ostwald, J. (2005) "Knowledge Communication In Design Communities." In R. Bromme, F. Hesse, & H. Spada (Eds.), Barriers and Biases in Computer-Mediated Knowledge Communication, http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/fi_ost-final.pdf
Dimensions of Computer-Mediated Communication in Design
- spatial (across distance) ? requiring networks
- temporal (across time) ? requiring support for asynchronous, indirect, long-term communication
- conceptual (across different communities) ? requiring support for common ground and shared understanding
- technological (between persons and artifacts) ? requiring knowledge-based, domain-oriented systems
A Few Claims / Hypotheses about Communities
- “Digital technologies are adept at maintaining communities already formed. They are less good at making them” — J.S. Brown / P. Duguid: "The Social Life of Information", Harvard Business School Press, 1999, p 226
- the importance of the role of digital technologies in supporting and even creating community is dependent on the existing opportunities possessed by enough people with similar interests to communicate and coordinate in an elective and on-going fashion
- digital technologies themselves can not create a community — but: if there's a "community waiting to happen," a group of people with similar interests or similar minds who have no other way of getting together ? digital technologies can be the very reason those people find each other
Important Dimensions
- media competition
- people prefer F2F interaction if given a choice, and therefore will ignore digital media in favor of class discussion
- opportunities to do the work F2F are extremely limited or non-existent
- how much of the resistance to computer-mediated communication is due to habit or clunky interfaces and will be outgrown in future generations?
- how important is it that the participants have met each other?
- nicheness
- LINUX developers groups
- parents with autistic children
- autonomy of participants
- trust
- trust is as important as motivation in building groups
- F2F is credited with building trust better
Distance — Conceptual Dimension
Communities of Practice and Communities of Interest
- Communities of Practice (CoPs), defined as groups of people who share a professional practice and a professional interest
- Communities of Interest (CoIs), defined as groups of people (typically coming from different disciplines) who share a common interest, such as framing and solving problems and designs artifacts (Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory)
- for details see:
Fischer, G. (2001) "Communities of Interest: Learning through the Interaction of Multiple Knowledge Systems," 24th Annual Information Systems Research Seminar In Scandinavia (IRIS'24), pp. 1-14.
[http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/iris24.pdf]
Communities of Practice (CoPs):
Homogenous Design Communities
- CoPs: practitioners who work as a community in a certain domain
- examples: architects, urban planners, research groups, software developers, software users, kitchen designers, computer network designer, voice dialog systems designers ……
- learning:
- masters and apprentices
- legitimate peripheral participation (LPP)
- develop a notion of belonging
- problems: “group-think” ? when people work together too closely in communities, they sometimes suffer illusions of righteousness and invincibility
- systems: domain-oriented design environments (e.g.: kitchen design, computer network design, voice dialogue design, …..)
Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LPP)
- LPP describes how newcomers become experienced members and eventually old timers of a community of practice or collaborative project
- newcomers become members of a community initially by participating in simple and low-risk tasks that are nonetheless productive and necessary and further the goals of the community
- through peripheral activities, novices become acquainted with the tasks, vocabulary, and organizing principles of the community
- as newcomers become old timers, their participation takes forms that are more and more central to the functioning of the community
Communities of Practice and Legitimate Peripheral Participation
LPP in Open Source Communities
Communities of Interest (CoIs):
Heterogeneous Design Communities
“Innovations come from outside the city wall.”— Kouichi Kishida
“I don’t know who discovered water, but it probably wasn’t a fish”— Marshall McLuhan
- CoIs = bring different CoPs together to solve a problem ? membership in CoIs is defined by a shared interest in the framing and resolution of a design problem
- diverse cultures
- people from academia and from industry
- software designers and software users
- students and researchers from around the world
- fundamental challenges:
- establish a common ground by building a shared understanding of the task at hand (which often does not exist up-front, but is evolved incrementally and collaboratively
- learning to communicate with others who have a different perspective
- primary goal: not “moving toward a center” (CoP) but “integrating diversity”
Communities of Interest: Bringing Different CoPs Together
Software Developers and Software Users
—
A Community of Interest (CoI)
- “system requirements are not so much analytically specified as they are collaboratively evolved through an iterative process of consultation between end-users and software developers”
Computer Science Technology Board (1990) "Scaling Up: A Research Agenda for Software Engineering," Communications of the ACM, 33(3), pp. 281-293.
- “System development is difficult not because of the complexity of technical problems, but because of the social interaction when users and system developers learn to create, develop and express their ideas and visions”
- Greenbaum, J., & Kyng, M. (Eds.) (1991) Design at Work: Cooperative Design of Computer Systems, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Hillsdale, NJ.)
CoIs: Beyond Novices, Experts, and LPP
- in CoIs: the center does not hold (or: a center can not be uniquely defined)
- multiple expertise:
- participants are experts in their own domain, but laypersons in other people’s domain of expertise
- laypersons do not want to become experts in the other domains and they do not have the time to become experts
- systemic problems requiring multiple expertise
- professionals with complementary expertise interact and cooperate
- all stakeholders have to know something about the respective knowledge domains of their cooperation partners
Differentiating CoPs and CoIs
| Dimensions | CoPs | CoIs |
| nature of problems | different tasks in the same domain | common task across multiple domains |
| knowledge development | refinement of one knowledge system; new ideas coming from within the practice | synthesis and mutual learning through the integration of multiple knowledge systems |
| major objectives | codified knowledge, domain coverage | shared understanding, making all voices heard |
| weaknesses | group-think | lack of a shared understanding |
| strengths | shared ontologies | social creativity; diversity; making all voices heard |
| people | beginners and experts; apprentices and masters | stakeholders (owners of problems) from different domains |
| learning | legitimate peripheral participation | informed participation |
Informed Participants
- informed participants are neither experts nor novices, but rather both:
- they are experts when they communicate their knowledge to others, and
- they are novices when they learn from others who are experts in areas outside their own knowledge
- informed participation is based on the claim that
- for many (design) problems, the knowledge to understand, frame, and solve these problems does not already exist, but must be collaboratively constructed and evolved during the problem-solving process
- informed participation requires information, but mere access to information is not enough ? the participants must go beyond the information that exists to solve their problems
- informed participation and supportive media:
- the primary role of media is not to deliver predigested information to individuals, but to provide the opportunity and resources for social debate and discussion.
Communication Problems in CoIs
Bridge Objects / Boundary Objects
“If a lion could speak would we understand him?” — Wittgenstein
- boundary objects serve
- to communicate and coordinate the perspectives of CoPs brought together for some purpose leading to the formation of a CoI
- the interaction between users and (computational) environments
- perform a brokering role involving translation, coordination and alignment between the perspectives of different CoPs
- examples:
- boundary objects can bridge the gap between situation models and system models
- prototypes serve as boundary objects between developers and users in participatory system design
- examples: vocabulary problems, help system, software reuse, McGuckin hardware store, …
CoIs: Social Creativity and Boundary Objects
Vocabulary Problem
same abstractions, but people use different names for them
A Name for this Object?
The Gap between Situation and System Models
Comparison Between Different Collaboration Structures
| CoPs | CoIs | Teams | Intensional Networks | Knotworking | |
| example domains | open source communities | complex design problems | units in organizations assembly line work | particular work projects cutting across organizational boundaries | flight crews operating room teams |
| how do they come into existence | co-evolve with practice | solving complex design problems require multiple expertise | organizational planning and structuring | active cultivation by those who need their support | patterns in a work configuration |
| working conditions | well-defined professions | confluence of multiple practices | problem oriented situation focus on task | flux and instability | responsibilities are distributed |
| well-established roles | masters and apprentices | stakeholders from different disciplines | team as unit team leader | collaboration across organizational boundaries | roles well defined collaborative practice is “plug and play” |
| duration | long-term | associated with specific projects | created and terminated from the outside | evolving over time | for specific tasks |
A Comparison Between Different Communities / Networks
| CoPs | CoIs | Teams | Intensional Networks | Knotworking | |
| characteristics | defined by a shared and well-established practice | CoIs = communities of CoPs | defined by management | defined by a shared concern | non-negotiable roles in specific teams |
| challenges | identity; well established centers | shared understanding; boundary objects shifting centers | flexible, less predictable configuration of workers | “who do I tell” and “who do I ask” | working together without knowing each others as persons |
| learning | legitimate peripheral participation; | exploit symmetry of ignorance as a source of power | workshops interaction with design process | important: not what you know but who you know” | plays little role in flight crews ? highly trained professionals |
| problems | “group think” | lack of shared understanding | too much “formally” defined; | need to be continually maintained, updated | only applicable to environments in which people are highly trained |
| technological support | DODEs | EDC | group memories | Web2gether | workflow systems |
Matching Media to Tasks
Covering a Wide-Spectrum of Activities with Media Integration
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