Dialog - memories and forgetting in Communities of Practice

Wonderful! Some of us in CPsquare have now booked the Veb Guest House in Florence for our Dialogue on Communities of Practice - memories and forgetting. It is a beautiful antique building just 10 minutes from the Duomo and has one of the highest terrace rooftops overlooking the city. I think we'll have a wonderful few days reflecting on our work and pursuing specific lines of questions - using each other as sources of inspiration. Master and apprentices welcome if you are interested in joining us (max. 20 people). The Dialog will run between the 5th and 8th October.

The questions we'll be starting with are:

Domain:
* What are our practices for keeping track of memory and learning in communities of practice? What do we forget?
* When do our practices fail us?
* Similarly for claiming a role in the world, do we claim our contribution properly? Do we disguise it? Forget it?

Practice:
* Through what relationships do we discover new skills and share what we know? How do we reinvent our view of the world for each other? How do we coach each other (before, on the spot and afterwards, at a distance)?
* What traces are we leaving for our work on communities of practice? What technologies and practices are there for supporting these traces? How do we get people to sponsor us in our practice?
* What is the nature of rigor in our relationships of sense making about our practice? How do we formalise the reputation that comes with our expertise? How do we live and engage with the ambiguities in our practice?

Community:
* Who is here? Who is not here? Why?
* What does that say about how we’ve spoken about our learning in previous interactions? What relationships have we sustained and what relationships have fallen away? Is there tolerance of the ambiguity of being a peripheral participant?

Part of our own history and memory is the Lisbon Dialog (which took place in Setúbal, not Lisbon). At the end of that Dialog we did a one day presentation in the place where I work. After this Dialog in Florence we'll be presenting a short workshop with our reflections at the Community Informatics Conference at Monash University in Prato.

Tags: pratodialog CIRNPrato2006