Community of practice (Commons + collaborative management)

• Defining communities of practice (CoP)

  180 min

  Learning Objectives

  • Explore the relation of CoP to Commons
  • Provide a background and understanding of CoP
  • Analyse specific case studies

  Introduction

  Group discussion Trainer will start the introduction to the module by asking participants about their current and previous experiences on communities of practice in projects, working and family life. The main goal of this activity is to map the plethora of current communication practices and reuse it during the course activities.

  Define CoP

  Communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on similar problems, a clique of pupils defining their identity in the school, a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques, a gathering of first-time managers helping each other cope. In a nutshell: Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. Communities develop their practice through a variety of activities. The following table provides a few typical examples:

  • Problem solving.
  • Requests for information.
  • Seeking experience.
  • Reusing assets.
  • Coordination and strategy.
  • Building an argument.
  • Growing confidence.
  • Discussing developments.
  • Documenting projects.
  • Visits.
  • Knowledge and identifying gaps.

  Design your own community of practice

  In this activity, we will use existing co-design methodologies for participants to design and propose their own intentional communication scenario.

  Homework

  Visit the XES: the Solidarity Economy Network of Catalonia initiative and post a short text describing this activity.

  References

  • Cultivating communities of practice: a guide to managing knowledge. By Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, and William Snyder, Harvard Business School Press, 2002.
  • Communities of practice: the organizational frontier. By Etienne Wenger and William Snyder. Harvard Business Review. January-February 2000, pp. 139-145.

• (Digital) commons

  180 min

  Learning Objectives

  • Provide a definition of the Commons
  • Analyse the impact of Decidim: free open-source participatory democracy for cities and organizations
  • Discuss other digital commons initiatives such as Wikipedia, Drupal and others

  Introduction

  Group discussion on “the commons in your life today?” Trainer will start the introduction to the module by asking participants about the everyday commons. Answers will be documented and then reused to customize the training material

  Defining the Commons

  In this section we will define the Commons. Ostrom’s work shows how, under certain conditions, commons can indeed be managed in a sustainable way by local communities of peers. Her approach takes into account that individual agents do not operate in isolation, nor are they driven solely by self interest, i.e. beyond homo-economicus approaches. Instead, she argues that communities communicate to build common protocols and rules that ensure their sustainability. As part of this work, she identified a set of principles (Ostrom, 1990) for the successful management of these commons:

  1. Clearly defined community boundaries: in order to define who has rights and privileges within the community.
  2. Congruence between rules and local conditions: the rules that govern behaviour or commons use in a community should be flexible and based on local conditions that may change over time. These rules should be intimately associated with the commons, rather than relying on a “one-size-fits-all” regulation.
  3. Collective choice arrangements: in order to best accomplish congruence (principle number 2), people who are affected by these rules should be able to participate in their modification, and the costs of alteration should be kept low.
  4. Monitoring: some individuals within the community act as monitors of behaviour in accordance with the rules derived from collective choice arrangements, and they should be accountable to the rest of the community.
  5. Graduated sanctions: community members actively monitor and sanction one another when behaviour is found to conflict with community rules. Sanctions against members who violate the rules are aligned with the perceived severity of the infraction.
  6. Conflict resolution mechanisms: members of the community should have access to low-cost spaces to resolve conflicts.
  7. Local enforcement of local rules: local jurisdiction to create and enforce rules should be recognised by higher authorities.
  8. Multiple layers of nested enterprises: by forming multiple nested layers of organisation, communities can address issues that affect resource management differently at both broader and local levels.

  Although these principles were originally defined for natural commons, they have also been discussed and adapted for the study of communities which develop and maintain digital commons, such as Wikipedia (Viégas et al., 2007; Forte et al., 2009) or Free/Libre Open Source Software such as Drupal (Rozas, 2017). This process of employing Ostrom’s principles in the study of how communities manage digital commons required, however, an analysis of how they may be re-interpreted within this different context.

  Description of the activity

  Visit the Decidem community with the participants of the course and document the results in a common document.

  Homework

  Post an article related to Decidim to the Diigo - eculture group

  References

  • Arvidsson, A., Caliandro, A., Cossu, A., Deka, M., Gandini, A., Luise, V., & Anselmi, G. (2017). Commons based peer production in the information economy (Report).
  • Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action . Cambridge University Press.
  • Ostrom, E. (2000). Collective action and the evolution of social norms. Journal of economic perspectives , 14 (3), 137-158.
  • Rozas, D. (2017). Self-organisation in Commons-Based Peer Production: Drupal : "the drop is always moving". (Doctoral dissertation, University of Surrey).

• Living with CoP

  180 min

  Learning Objectives

  • Provide a critical analysis CoP cases
  • Examine the use and advantages of collaborative management

  Introduction

  Group discussion: Introduction to the session (theme: business as commons). Participants will brainstorm on different business management models around them. Answers will be documented and then reused to customize the training material.

  Business as commons

  This section demonstrates that the future is in business as commons. In a world where business models are changing and even the traditional notion of work has lost its fit with current paradigms.

  1. Governance and organisation of Free/Libre Open Source The first studies to explain how FLOSS communities organise themselves arrived from the field of software engineering, in the work of Raymond (2001) describing the two different development models of “The Cathedral” and “The Bazaar”. The concept of the bazaar model was subsequently further developed by Demil and Lecocq (2006), in the field of organisation and management studies. Demil and Lecocq (2006) proposed that a new generic governance structure was being seen: bazaar governance. They characterised this form of governance and discussed the strengths and weaknesses of the bazaar structure with respect to that of the market. They suggested that the way in which these communities are governed is distributed, allowing their members to participate, taking into account a diverse set of interests.
  2. Flat organisations A flat organization (also known as horizontal organization) has an organizational structure with few or no levels of middle management between staff and executives. An organization's structure refers to the nature of the distribution of the units and positions within it, also to the nature of the relationships among those units and positions. Tall and flat organizations differ based on how many levels of management are present in the organization, and how much control managers are endowed with.
  3. More commons oriented management definitions:
     • Collaborative production: Referring to CBPP as a mode of production by which a set of individuals produce something valuable which did not exist before their interaction.
     • Peer-based: the interaction in CBPP is not solely or mainly coordinated by contractual relationships, nor is it coordinated in a hierarchical way. The tasks are based on free creation and self-assignation. The range of motivations is diverse and may be intrinsic (e.g. for fun) or extrinsic (e.g. in order to earn social capital), but they are not mainly based on contractual obligations nor forces of coercion.
     • Commons-based: CBPP is characterised for being not only a peer production process, but also a commons process, which is driven by general interest. For example, in digital environments, this results in the openness of the common resources. Favouring reproducibility: characterised for favouring the reproducibility of the goods created, as well as the methodologies and the practices among others.

  Video

  Watch the video on Business as Commons (Samantha Slade). Study, document and discuss its main arguments. Create a common document with all participants, share it with others.

  Homework

  Search and document experts and/or articles on collaborative management. Post two links to our collective awareness Diigo group.

  References

  • The future is in business as commons | Samantha Slade | TEDxGeneva.
  • Bauwens, M. (2005). The political economy of peer production. CTheory.
  • Bauwens, M. & Kostakis, V. (2014). From the communism of capital to capital for the commons: towards an open co-operativism. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information.
  • Society, 12(1), 356–361.