Supporting Community of Practice Facilitators

Supporting Community of Practice Facilitators

The IDeA have published a report on the Community of Practice ‘Facilitator’s Workshop’ I organised for them on 27th April. The purpose of the workshop was to bring together the various facilitators of the on-line communities supported on the IDeA CoP platform, to learn from their experiences in facilitating communities of practice across local government, and in response to issues raised by the facilitators through their own dedicated CoP, namely:

  • how can I keep momentum going?
  • who can I turn to for support?
  • will my opinions be seen as ‘novice’ compared to others in the community?

Community adviser and activist Ed Mitchell spoke on ‘Nurturing
communities from networks: the gritty bits’. There was also a session
from Hilary Messeter from the National College for School Leadership
(NCSL).

As with many of these type of events, the coming together and sharing of knowledge can be a therapeutic  process, i.e. the realisation that you’re not alone and that someone else has the same concerns and issues as yourself, and better still,  finding someone who has solved the issue you’ve been worrying about.

One particularly encouraging piece of information that emerged from the workshop was that most of the CoP’s across local government have a 10% contribution rate, which is well beyond the ‘1% rule’.

Dave Briggs, who facilitates the Collaboration and Social Media CoP, and the LGNewmedia site summed the day up very well in saying:-

“We’re trying to sell two very ambitious concepts with this [IDeA CoP] platform.
Firstly, we are asking people to tear down silos and start working
together and sharing our knowledge – something that is an anathema to
some elements of local government culture. Secondly, we are asking them
to do so using the web, with blogs, wikis and forums!”

It was apparent to me that there is a close relationship between effective CoPs and effective facilitators – i.e. you can’t have one without the other.

3 thoughts on “Supporting Community of Practice Facilitators

  1. Quicklinks

    Just cleaning up my Bloglines and thought I would share some of the posts I had been saving. Brad Hinton reflects on oral history and storytelling and points to some useful resources. Stephen Dubner (of Freakonomics) sharing Mark Twain’s…

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