Professional Belonging: Networking through Communities of Practice
Value, maturity, influence, and the ORE CoP birthday survey
We’ve written a lot about how to develop healthy communities, but what we’ve not explicitly written about in this context is the overlap between “education” and “work”. CoPs provide an excellent way to continue life-long learning, network with other professionals who are interested in a topic and create change in areas we strive to improve. All of these benefits are only possible, though, if you have a healthy, sustainable community.
We’re pleased that the Open Recognition is for Everybody community continues to grow. Not only do new people pop into the CoP, members are developing real relationships with one another. In this post, we’ll share some outputs from our annual birthday survey and show how trust and connection are keystones to a CoP.
Data
To measure the health of a community we can look at raw numbers, such as the number of new members that have joined in a specified time period. With over 430 people in the ORE community, it’s grown 27% over the past year.
But that doesn’t tell the whole picture, which is why it’s important to use structured surveys to discover other data, including sentiment. Last year, we showed you how to gather data on a CoP using an approach from McMillan and Chavis’s 1986 paper ‘Sense of community: A definition and theory’.
This time, we again madesure that we not only asked the same questions, but included a box for free-text entry so people could give us unfiltered feedback. We’re sharing some of the positive results from the survey. It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, but the forecast is healthy.
Trust within a community is crucial for collective success and in itself a form of growth. The more people trust each other, the easier it is to move together towards a collective vision. High scores on our 4-point scale, which intentionally lacks a neutral middle option, indicate strong trust levels.
That’s all very well in practice, but what about in theory?
Last week, we shared short recap videos of Community Conversations, a three-part workshop series about making the most of your Community of Practice (CoP).
In this post, instead of walking you through the methodologies and metrics, we’re simply going to share a few highlights from the results of the ORE birthday survey, linking it to what we covered in Community Conversations.
Value
Value cycles in relation to CoPs refer to the different stages of value creation that occur as members of a CoP interact, share knowledge, and learn from each other. These cycles help to assess and understand the value generated by learning in social contexts.
“I appreciate opportunities to connect with peers, regardless of differences in geographical location and time zones.” (survey participant)
One of the key things that members of the ORE community value is connection, a feeling of going deeper than the ‘Immediate value’ of Cycle 1 and gaining fulfilment from being able to apply what’s learned in the community to their own work (Cycle 3).
‘Vibes’ are not something easy to measure, but they are important for any kind of CoP, including the ORE community. Thinking about the different kinds of value that communities can generate was the focus of our first Community Conversations workshop.
Maturity
The work we have done around maturity models is all about navigating your community through its growth stages. We’ve been heavily influenced by the work of Emily Webber, Bailey Richardson, Kevin Huynh & Kai Elmer Sotto.
“This community is emergent and resilient. I feel we have been coming out of the closet in the last year and building momentum like never before… signals are that we might be reaching the inflection point of the exponential curve.” (survey participant)
There are ups and downs in the life of any online community, but the idea is that community members feel like they are part of something that is evolving, and that they feel a connection to others.
Again, ‘connection’ is a difficult thing to measure, but asking how important the community is to members is a good way of trying to figure this out. The second Community Conversations workshop explored maturity models to help your CoP move in the right direction.
Influence
Ultimately, the reason people become members of CoPs is to make a difference. They want to improve their own practice, but also make a difference and impact on the world. By being part of an online community, individual members have the ability to influence things which they may not be able to do alone.
“I feel belonging to this community more than any other I inhabit professionally. In fact, this community has been the constant while my professional affiliation has changed a few times…” (survey participant)
One way in which influence happens is for one community to influence another. In the case of the ORE community, there is a reasonably high confidence that what we are advocating for (Open Recognition! Open Badges!) is something that is having a wider impact.
In the third Community Conversations workshop we discussed communities as change agents, introducing the two loops model and our work around systems convening. The latter is based on the work of Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner.
Conclusion
We’ve selected some of the results from our survey to illustrate points relating to our series of Community Conversations workshops. We’ve work to do in the ORE community, for example, in helping people have more agency and giving more and different ways for members to meet up in synchronous ways.
What we do know, based on the work we’ve done (and shared!) around value cycles, maturity models, and influence, is that the ORE community is on the right track.
If you’d like to join the community, check out badges.community. If you’d like WAO to help you with your work around Communities of Practice, get in touch!
With input provided by Laura Hilliger
