 Hi everybody, my name is Doug Belshaw from We Are Open Co-op, I'm here with my colleague Anna Helger. Earlier this week for Open Education Week we run a community conversations workshop for about managing knowledge in communities. This version of the workshop is exactly the same, except it's shorter, because it doesn't have the activities in. So we thought this more condensed version might be useful when we're sharing it around the internet. So over to you Anna. Yes, also hello from me. We are Doug and Anna from We Are Open Co-op and together with Participate, we are running the series of workshops. This is number four. We're happy to introduce you into community knowledge management today. So our objectives for this workshop are for you to be able to recognize and explain the differences between personal knowledge management and community management. We want you to be able to compare different tools for knowledge management in the context of the community of practice. And of course we want to encourage you to give yourself a designated time for your own community knowledge management work. Over to you Doug. So let's just start from the beginning. What do we mean when we talk about knowledge? What is this? Let's just start from the beginning. So let's start with an image which shows the difference between for example data and information and knowledge and insight and wisdom and impact. We're really interested in this bit here, the knowledge bit. That's all about connecting the dots in your community. As you can see here, run a bit of information, connect them together in ways which create meaning and that's kind of knowledge. So to take an example from my career, when I used to be a teacher, for example, I was part of the history teaching community. I was part of the IT teaching community. I was part of the community of my school. I was part of the community of teachers in my area, and also in my country, and also the world. So depending on which context I was within for that teacher community, the knowledge would be slightly different. So for example, behavior management techniques might be really important if I'm teaching at a tough school, they might be less important elsewhere. The knowledge of how to teach historiography might be extremely important if I'm teaching a level history, not so much if I'm teaching year seven ICT. So knowledge is specific and meaning is created from this information. And then if we move on to insight and wisdom, what we're doing there is we're enabling groups and individuals to be able to see things. We're generating insights so that people realize things that maybe they hadn't realized before. And on this example, which is from human clouds gaping void series of cartoons, wisdom is connecting together insights so that people can really reflect on what's going on. So this is like the teacher at the corner of the staff room who's been there and done that and knows how to deal with classes and teach things to the best of their ability. Now, at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is we're trying to generate impact like every community really wants to make an impact on the world and you're joining together to create that impact together. So, Anna, we've we've got some examples on the next slide here of different personal knowledge management tools. Do you use any of these? Yeah, so I'm using pocket and Pinterest currently and I also stumbled upon this sofa app that I haven't used so far, but it's a personal downtime manager as it's called. And I work also in a cinema and people keep throwing movie names at me and things that I have to watch and somehow I have to organize that and I thought maybe I'll try this app because right now I have like five different lists and five different apps. So yeah, that would be something for my personal knowledge management. So we all have these different tools that we use to be able to cope with how much we're bombarded with information and we create our own knowledge based on how we connect together these different bits of information. But really with personal knowledge management we're creating stuff for our own benefit and then maybe yes we might share a Pinterest board with someone else or you might share an article via pocket or whatever. But really what we're doing is we're doing it for our own benefit first. So just to show kind of the boundary between personal knowledge management and community knowledge management. I went on holiday recently with my family to a place called Faro in Portugal. And you can see here some little green dots on a Google map, places that I've bookmarked for us to visit while we're there and the ones that are yellow or the ones that we did visit and I've left a review on those particular places. And then I can potentially share these bookmarks with people who might be going to Faro in the future. So from a community point of view, the initial community is very small. It's my family, the four members of my nuclear family. And then we go the next step out. It's kind of wider family and friends who might be interested and also might want to go at some point. But then if we extrapolate out from that, where we end up with a kind of a community knowledge management piece around this is something like TripAdvisor. This may be people who go back to the same place every year, people who live there, people who have a vested interest in curating knowledge about this particular place. So TripAdvisor is different. It's kind of a community knowledge management place compared to your personal Google Maps. But when we're talking about communities, what do we mean when we're talking about communities of practice? Yeah, so communities of practice are basically people coming together who share a concern, which means like they have a domain that they share together. They talk about their practice, so they learn how to do things better or different or change things up. And they interact regularly, which means they are coming together in a community and all of this together creates a community of practice. They have been around forever, but who really pinpoint them down into something that we could use to inform our work and our behaviors and everything that we need to grow for, especially for our practice is Etienne Wenger and his team, and they wrote many, many books about it. And yeah, if you're interested in learning more about community of practice, I really recommend reading some of them. We are also running together with participate a community of practice called Open Recognitionists for Everybody, and we are using it as an example throughout this workshop again and again. And this community is about Open Recognition, but also about open badges and in general communities of practice. So you are very much invited to have a look at this community. So if we've talked about what knowledge is and we've talked about what communities are, what do we mean when we're talking about community knowledge management? Well, if we use this image from Harold Jarkey, who has been doing workshops around personal knowledge management for over 20 years now, he talks about three different kind of areas in which we can pay attention to. Now, we're interested in this middle one, we're interested in communities of practice. So if we if we think about the difference between these three areas, we've got on the left hand side of the bottom structured hierarchical ways of getting things done within your organization. We're sharing things on Slack, we're organizing stuff on SharePoint where we're kind of curating stuff just for our team at work. On the other side of things, we've got informal networks, places where we're learning new stuff. We're putting angry political opinions on what used to be called Twitter. We're sharing cat pictures on Instagram. We're doing all that kind of stuff. And in the middle, we've got this liminal space, which we call communities of practice, which are trusted spaces to test new ideas. And really that particular place there allows us to join together with people in other workplaces who might be interested in the same kind of stuff as us. And not just like having a stream of things going by, like on social networks, but doing stuff together. So when we're talking about community knowledge management, we are fans of Rosie Sherry's work. If you take these slides, you can click through to the link. And her emerging definition at the moment says, well, community knowledge management is really about collaboratively collecting information inside stories and perspectives with the goal of supporting communities so that they can learn and grow together. And you might think, well, that's great, but what does that mean in practice? So let's have a look at what those information, insights, stories and perspectives might mean. So the top left there, let's say there's an example of someone who compiles a spreadsheet of all the tools that their community has used in a particular year. And they share that immediately, not just, you know, oh, I've created this for my personal benefit and you might find it useful. The whole point is let's do this together. So the insights of the bottom left, this person recognises that their most impactful learning they've seen in this community happens in small peer-led groups. They're reflecting on their experience and they're sharing the insight with everyone else. Top right, you've got a story about a barn raising. We'll talk about that later on about a community wiki. Anyone from different levels of expertise, either technically or in terms of curating and managing knowledge is welcome to join in and kind of have a focused attention on that. And then the bottom right hand one is interesting. So you always end up with people who come from a different background into a community and initially they might feel out of place. And eventually, hopefully if they feel welcomed, then they realise that the different perspective that they have and the stories that they can tell and their diverse experience actually adds value to the community in which they've decided to join. So all of those are just little vignettes, which are fictional but based on experience that we've had over the years of different ways in which community knowledge management can really support a community and diverse perspectives. Yeah, and the next bit I'm going to talk a bit about the community knowledge repositories. So how and where do you collect your knowledge in your community. So in the open recognition community or in the participate community, we are collecting all of this in this space and everything we have there is called things. So we have badges, we have events and docs where we collect everything, but sometimes not you don't want to use just one space. So for example, if you have a lot of things you want to document and a lot of things that people can read through, it's recommendable to use a wiki, a very known example for this is the Wikipedia. And I will also show you another example of a wiki later. The next bit would be a forum. So this is for if you need a lot of conversation if you have discussions if you want people to share as much as they can and get into contact with each other. We recommend you to use a forum. For example, there's discourse that you can use. And if you really need to organize learning, if there have to has to be courses and people should come and discuss and learn and really grow together. We would recommend you use a learning management system, especially if it's around educational resources and a good example for this is Moodle. You can see Moodle here in the screenshot that we took and here you can see there are courses and calendars and it's a very big thing to use. Then there's discourse, it's a forum so you have like categories and tags and everything is very searchable and structured. And there is a wiki and the Wikipedia as you can see. So we also set up a wiki it's called Badge wiki and it's been there for I think seven years now and it's like the big knowledge repository for everything around open badges. This is what it looks like it's a wiki like Wikipedia and you can just search anything around open badges and really dive into everything you have to know. And also what you can do is you can join the wiki and also put your own knowledge in there and you can request an account if you want. And we can approve this and we just do the approving bit because we want to prevent spam bots in there. And this also brings us to the next bit where we talk about community knowledge contribution and how to do that. Yeah, so we've talked about knowledge and what that is we talked about communities and communities of practice and now we've talked about repositories. But how do you encourage people to actually contribute their knowledge to these repositories and share their knowledge with the community in ways where other people can make sense of it and understand it. Well, we've talked about Badge wiki there and there's a set of practices around that so Badge wiki has been around seven years. There's been times when there's been loads of activity and lots of editing going on and there's been times when there's hardly been any editing going on. And that's intentional like there are times when there are lots of people editing and times when there's not we don't just rely on people stumbling upon the wiki and deciding to edit. So what are the practices around this knowledge repository? Well, one, our regular community calls so at least once a month we have a community call for this particular community the RE community. And we have a place for asynchronous discussions which we'll show you in a moment. We have barn raisins which are times which you're like, right, let's come together for a designated time, say an hour or two. And we're going to work on the things that we want to work on like we need a page on verifiable credentials. We need a page on the history of open badges or whatever it is we decide together what we need people volunteer to put them together. But also, in order for this to happen you have to recognize pro social behaviors. So let's talk about that a little bit. In this particular radar plot here that you can see this comes from the green piece. If you go to the next slide if you got the green piece project that we did looked at different ways and reasons that people might contribute to open source projects. And it's the same for your community as well. There's lots of different reasons why people might want to turn up and might want to volunteer. Sometimes it's actually what they're paid to do they work for a company who has a vested interest in this thing existing. They might have some political motivations for this to exist. They might be scratching an age so they just need this page to exist because they're sick of having to explain things to people and they just want to point them to a page. They might be bored at work and they want a side project. They might just be very altruistic but whatever it is, there are reasons that we can encourage that people might want to contribute. So why don't we give people some roles. About 15 years ago there was a wonderful book called wiki patterns by Stuart Maider. And he came up with all different kinds of roles you can have within a wiki. And so let's just talk about three of those. Obviously there's a wiki author. There's people who will write stuff, add to pages, create content. But there's also really valuable roles around that. There's a wiki gardener, people who tidy things up, put things in the right place. Who make sure that things are consistent. Who just look after the place and make sure that it looks it's tidy. And then there's also wiki fairies, people who just really want to make sure that things look good. And that's important because the better things look, the more likely people are going to want to read them and interact with them and potentially even edit them as well. So by encouraging these kinds of behaviors, maybe with badges, because it is badge wiki after all, we can create badges for those three roles, but also for attending the barn raising sessions. And if people come up to those come along to those barn raising sessions regularly, why not give them a badge for coming along five times or however often it's going to be. Now the great thing about having a community knowledge repository is that you've got a space now for running projects on. So in our case, we had someone who said, it's great that we can invite people along to this community and they can interact and ask questions. But there's not like a toolkit, there's not a space, a place that I can send people to to find out more about say open recognition. Now because we had badge wiki, we could run a project on top of it, which is what we did the open recognition toolkit. So last year, after we decided in a community called this is what we're going to do, we found a working group, and we focus some attention, and we met regularly. And the idea was to launch not version 1.0 but version 0.1 at the epic to 2023 in Vienna, which was a meeting for people like us. So we met on a regular basis, we count the version 0.1. And on the next slide, you can see it in all of its glory version 0.1, it looks like a wiki page because that's what it is. It's got some images on there, etc. But it's got some useful information over time. That's going to iterate and develop into version 0.2, 0.3 all the way up and version 1.0 will be really shiny. We're not waiting for version 1.0 to share it. We're sharing the initial results that we've got. And then, yes, we're meeting synchronously. Yes, we're recognizing people's behaviors. But we've also got a space within the community for people who want to talk about the open recognition toolkit, a separate space, a separate part of the community where people can come along if they're interested. They can have a bit of a chat and you can say, well, next time, let's talk about this, or I think we're missing a space to talk about this, or maybe for version 2 we could add in these things. But we also have a space to talk about the thing that we also talk about synchronously too. Thank you, Doug. And this is the end of our community conversation for now. If you got inspired and you want to learn more about this community or the wiki or everything else we are working on with participate and this community, go to badges.community. And there you find every link you need to get involved. If you want to see these slides and have a look at the links that are in there, you find a Bitly link or you can use that QR code on the slide. And also for this conversation, you can earn a badge and you can follow this Bitly link to the participate community and apply for a badge over there. Thank you so much for listening. And if you have any questions, feel free to ask us anytime.