Communities of Practice in Development Contexts
Participants
Bram Langen, Josien Kapma, Kees de Ruiter, Ronald Lutalo, Dorine Ruter
Background
During a CPsquare workshop (Jan-Mar 2007) on communities of practice, three KM4DEV members (Patricia Mantey, Bill Williams and Dorine Ruter) worked together on a project on communities of practice in the context of development. Several development practitioners / community facilitators were interviewed, literature was reviewed and resources listed. A bit of background and the final report (June 2007) can be found here: http://www.ruter.nl/blog/?p=63
Open Space
The Open Space session during KM4DEV 2007 in Zeist was used to announce this project and ask for feedback and participation.
- Josien suggested to re-package the info and smaller portions e.g. via blog posts. This would encourage focused dialogue over a longer period of time.
- Kees de Ruiter would be more interested in reading the whole document at once and give feedback e.g. from the pint of view how ICCO is facilitating (and about to encourage/set-up/facilitate more) communities of practice in their network.
- Several group members (and other km4dev 2007 visitors not participating in this session) indicated they would be interested to give their feedback on the topic, for example by answering the interview questions.
Follow-up
Wider group to be kept informed. Touch base with project members and find ways to follow up suggestions. In the mean time, initial project members are now discussing a facilitated email discussion in July (similar to what Josien suggested), selecting one specific element of the broad issue of CoPs in development. Information on this will be distributed among interested people and larger km4dev group. All people interested to read the whole document and give feedback, please see the link and / or contact one of the people below.
Contact persons:
- Dorine Rüter, d.ruter[AT]etcnl.nl
- Bill Williams, bill.williams[AT]estbarreiro.ips.pt
- Patricia Mantey, pmantey[AT]aed.org
