Attendees: (25H)
- Daniel Rothman - DISA, working CoP for emerging technologies (separate CoPs for each) (25N)
- Evelyn Aponte - works with fed civilian agencies on Best Practices (25O)
- Robin Wood - scientist by trade.. started leadership development program at NASA earth sciences group (25P)
- Twyla Courtot - Supporting office of Chief Engineer @ NASA, CE is working for formal communities of practice, (25Q)
- Peter Groen - NIH {nid 25I} (25R)
- Doug Nebert - working on geographic data exchange data. keyword NSDI National Spatial Data Infrastructure (25S)
- Lisa Wolfisch - Census Beareau, "statistical agency", fedstats group has ~70 member agencies. Also participates in open source community (25T)
Identified Challenge - pulling communities of practice from across (26G)
NSDI community portal question - what is a portal - consolidating information (26H)
user identities, preservicng privacy, calendaring, document tracking, threaded discussions, self enrolling (26I)
Question - what is the definition of a Community of Practice first - is there a difference between a CoP and a "user group" (26F)
differentiation between CoP and knowledge management (26O)
- KM is a process, focused on outcomes (26P)
- user group is less structure, somehow "less mature" than CoP (26Q)
- CoP is participant focused (26R)
- common interest - some "practice" (26S)
- documentation of processes/knowledge is a component (26T)
- structured (26U)
- some important roles (26V)
- NOT mutually exclusive - any individual can participate in many (2AB)
- NOT an organizational/project structure (2AC)
- scope is self-defined, may permit narrower layers/sets of discourse - scope is defined, however (2AD)
Question: are there questions/issues that are compelling enough to ease the formation of a CoP? (28Q)
- Doug - USGS has a standing set of mechanisms, so these are not such an issue... (28R)
- Lisa - yes and no - 508 issues generate strong, dynamic CoP; but many different communities of interest (28S)
Relationships between CoP and Best Practices (2AE)
- CoP _normally_ generates and disseminates Best Practices, though not by definition (2AF)
- There are a set of Best Practices surrounding the generation and management of CoPs (2AG)
Template - 1) purposes of best practices (2AH)
- what's the use/importance? (2AI)
- relations between CoPs and BPs (2AT)
- 1b) BPs are most relevant within a particular CoP - establishes context (2AU)
- 1b) CoPs generally act to generate, hold, and disseminate BPs (wither formally or informally) (2AV)
- or at least we hope so (2AW)
- 1b) CoPs are furthered by their BP repositories - incentive to continue/generate Community of Practice (2AX)
- maturity models and/or certification standards (2AY)
- 1c) clarity - concise "placeholder" and point of recognition for those outside the CoP or BP community (2AZ)
- 1c) known push-back on certification from the Perl developer community (2ER)
- 1c) CONTRA - requires certifying authority (2B0)
- 1c) CONTRA - empty credentialing (2B1)
- 1c) CONTRA - elitism within the community (2B2)
- 1c) CONTRA - beurocracy and generation of a self-protecting set of vested interests.. (2CC)
2) Content (2CD)
- What assets does the user community need? (2CE)
- define good/better/best practices (2CJ)
- 2b) higher end, more transferrable practices across specific tasking (2CK)
- 2b) greater ROI (2CL)
- 2b) accessability - ease of transferring to practice (documentation, available source code, COTS, &c.) (2CM)
- 2b) facilitates open exchange of information (2CN)
- 2b) patronage and support by some credible and recognized entity (individual, company, institution) (2CO)
- 2b)internal guidelines for applicability/application (self-identifying in terms of application) (2CP)
- criteria/certification for "best" (2CQ)
- 2c) CONTRA - fuzzy scale, very situational and organizationally dependent (2CR)
- some domain-specific examples (2CS)
3) Repository (2CW)