Planning a workshop to launch of a Community of Practice

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Original Message

From: Johannes Schunter, posted on 2009/04/03

Dear all,

I'm in the middle of planning a workshop (30 participants) which - among other things - is meant to initiate the launch of a Community of Practice with members of a UN agency and external partners.Besides some substantive sessions around issues of Capacity Development and sharing of experiences, we have session slots of altogether 4 1/2 hours to achieve the following with regard to a possible CoP:

Day 1: 1 hour 45 min

  • Explain what a Communities of Practices is
  • Review and discuss results of a needs assessment survey for the CoP which was done online prior to the workshop
  • Identify together with workshop participants further needs, possible benefits, priorities and possible challenges with regard to a new CoP
  • Define together what kind of CoP this should be:
    • To what extent the CoP should focus on problem solving, knowledge sharing, best practices and/or innovation
    • Discuss possible services and outputs
    • Discuss possible governance structure, meeting rhythms, etc)

Day 2: 2 hours 45 minutes

  • Formulate CoP vision statement
  • Formulate CoP charter
  • Formulate CoP governance structure
  • Identify core CoP group (3-6 people)
  • Define next steps

While I already have a sense of how to go about it, I would be most happy to receive your ideas and suggestions how to best achieve the above results. I would be particularly interested in

  • facilitation techniques to get the most effective input from participants with regards to their needs and priorities for the new CoP
  • facilitation techniques to develop concrete output documents (vision statement, charter and governance structure)
  • good ways to identify a core group to take ownership in nurturing and co-facilitating the CoP

Please also feel free to challenge the above agenda and point out additional or different things we should focus on or keep in mind!

Contributors

All replies in full are available in the discussion page. Contributions received with thanks from:

Johannes Schunter
Carl Jackson
Christina Merl
Joitske Hulsebosch
Sam Lanfranco
Caitlin Bentley
Lawrence Wasserman

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