SciOut18 Flash Talk: Lou Woodley
https://rockedu.rockefeller.edu/new_outreach/flash-talk-lou-woodley/

So hi! Good morning everybody and welcome back. So I'm Lee Woodley I work at AAAS and I'm really interested in both the technical so I think online tools and the human so I think people community managers who really make scientific collaborations, scientific teamwork, scientific communities actually function productively. So I've been invited to talk here this morning about communities of practice and as Jeff has outlined that's really because what we want to do now for the remainder of the conference is think about what comes next. You know we've had these productive, useful, generative conversations but what now and the notion of a community of practice is something that has been kicked around for at least a couple of years but we've never really had explicit conversations about what does that mean? What does that look like? How might we actually create that and participate in it? So what I'm going to do is I'm essentially going to give you a ten-minute primer on communities of practice theory. So the notion here isn't to be top-down. It's not about saying you know there's a right way and a way that we can do this. It's to give us a framework. It's to get us back to the theory so that we're thinking about this from the same perspective and we can use that then as a way of opening up the dialogue about what things we might want to use and where we may decide to go forward from here and listening to this and going actually we're not community perhaps at all is a completely valid response. So there's no assumptions about the the output here. So what I'm going to be doing is drawing on the communities of practice literature. Primarily this is the work of Etienne Wenger and colleagues so they've been thinking a lot about knowledge generation and social learning over the years and have come up with a lot of the foundational ideas about communities of practice and this talk is going to break out into three key takeaways and those takeaways are designed to match along with the core themes of the conference. So we have models, methods, and measures. So I'm gonna start first of all talking about methods. So that's the why why. Why do we need communities of practice ever? How do we deal with knowledge generation? How do we deal with the cultivation and the the use of knowledge? Then I'm going to move on and I'm going to outline the model for communities of practice. So communities of practice have a strict definition. We think about them in a particular way so I'm gonna elucidate that model and drop in a few questions that might help us start thinking about what that might apply to to us in this science outreach space and then finally the final thing is measures. So really getting to evaluation and just touching on this idea of well okay if we do go down this route and we do decide that we want to do something more together, how are we gonna know whether it's working or not okay? So let's start at the beginning, so let's start with the methods and thinking about knowledge management. So if you think about how generative hopefully the the past couple of days have been for you and you think about the the conversations that we've had as a result of the lightning talks, around the tables, in the corridors, at Story Collider, out on the terrace, over lunch and you think about what you gain from that, really we've been iterating knowledge together. We've been dropping in our own experiences the things that we've done, sharing those with others, and and building on that together and that really fits in with the five ways in which we think about knowledge. So first of all knowledge can't be codified simply as a static object. So if we'd given you all a bit of paper or a laptop and we said write down everything you know about science outreach that wouldn't really be very useful and if we'd put that all together in one place that isn't gonna make any one of us any better at doing science outreach. So we think about knowledge as not being able to be broken down into that single static thing. Part of the reason for that is that knowledge as I'm sure you're well aware can be both explicit so the kind of things that we choose to codify in publications, in posters, in presentations and implicit so the kind of things that we learn through interacting with each other, through having conversations, through talking about how things are done around here. As a result knowledge is therefore also iterative, so like the process of science itself you know we we may start with a core set of assumptions, core set of things that we know but we're always building on those. We're always testing them, adding on a bit from somebody else, trying that out, coming up with new knowledge and that means that knowledge the generation of knowledge is a social endeavor. You know we don't sit in our dreaded silos and learn stuff by ourselves. We learn it through interacting with each other and then finally for knowledge to be maximally useful we talk about how important it is for knowledge to get out of those silos and actually cross boundaries into other areas, so knowledge is maximally useful when we can reuse it and apply it to different situations and so the reason that I'm outlining all of this is that communities of practice, this notion of them, it has arisen as a way of cultivating and managing knowledge together. So a community of practice comes together around doing and managing knowledge in these ways that I've just described. So to end the first section, some questions. So do we think we need a community of practice in terms of bubbling up the various expertise that we have in this room and beyond the room for the folks that weren't able to be here? Does a community of practice sound like a framework that might be helpful? And then reflecting on your own needs and your own expertise, you know, what knowledge do you have to give and in in what format? Gow have you most enjoyed sharing things here? You know maybe you ended up in conversations about things that you didn't realize you were going to talk about and these are things that you want to take forward and then what would you like to get in terms of gaining knowledge from other people? Do you know what you don't know and do you know how you might go about finding it out? Okay so the second section as I say we're going to talk about models. So I specifically want to outline what we mean when we talk about a community of practice and so venue and colleagues describe a community of practice as having three key structural elements. So they talked about the notion of a domain, a community, and a practice. So the domain: this is really what it is we are focused on. So for a community of practice to be most effective we need to know why is that we're gathering. This really gets at the the purpose, the goals of why we're coming together as a community and Mallon gives us an identifier identity. So we should self-identify as being part of a community of practice and that allows us to know why it is that we are here. That also allows people looking in from the outside so other stakeholders who may be interested in what we're doing to see that there's legitimacy in that so we we've created a definition of why we're doing what we're doing. So one of the questions that I would ask about this is is science outreach our domain or is that too big? Is that is that too amorphous? Is there too much going on there? Are we actually talking about multiple sub communities of practice focused on different areas, different types of outreach, different audiences for outreach? I don't want to presuppose what that looks like but if we use this framework to think about this how might that influence what we we might want to create after this meeting. So a second structural element of a community of practice is the community. So we've talked a lot over the last couple of days about reaching out to underserved audiences, making sure that we're including all voices in the room, making sure that we don't make assumptions but that we listen deeply and therefore we learn from from everybody that we bring together. So once we've identified a particular domain or various subdomains then we need to be quite intentional about saying well who do we need there around that table to help us advance our knowledge to cultivate our activities in that particular domain. And then the final piece as I hope is following on quite logically is the practice. So that's okay we know what domain is. We know who we've got around the table. What are we actually gonna do together? Just standing at an online site and putting a bunch of documents in there that's not a practice. You know we talked about cultivation of knowledge through the ways I described at the beginning, through interactions, through building something, through trying to tackle a particular problem. You know do we want to work on it so we working on evaluation models and comparing what we've each done in our different projects. Do we want perhaps to you know think about writing something together? You know then needs to be an activity or a set of activities which may include meetings, may include annual conferences, may include webinars, may include live chats but we need to be regularly doing something together to cultivate this core knowledge base that we have. Okay so now is section 2 so that's thinking about three structural elements of what a COP is and then I promise the final thing that I was going to end with was touching on the the measures theme or thinking about the evaluation. And so one of the signs of a healthy community as it gets set up and as it gets to maturity, is that we were able to be self-reflective. We're able to kind of say well is this working for me? Why am I here? Are we are we really doing things that are useful? And with a community of practice then firstly obviously we need to identify the shared goals for a community of practice but it's not just about saying well are we producing the output, the the report, the conversations, the thing that we said we were going to do. So it's not just about saying you know let's let's count clicks, let's count comments, let's count you know what's going on there because we think about knowledge as I said as spreading out beyond silos. So if we come together like at a conference like this and we share knowledge, what happens to that knowledge afterwards? So what are you going to do with what you learned here? How is that knowledge that that is being created within a potential community of practice helping you get better at your day job or helping you tell somebody at your Institute how they could go and look something up or talk to this other person and learn this thing? We call now the concept of a double-knit knowledge organization so that you're in the community of practice and we're cultivating knowledge together but then we take it out beyond the community of practice and we weave it into what we actually do in the outside world. And that creates really interesting self-reflection and evaluation questions because we don't just measure what goes on in the community of practice in the group, but we start thinking about what that looks like out in the world. Okay so that's the end of the primer that was communities of practice 101. So what I encourage us to do and Ben's gonna help us think about it's like ground this now in practical reality and what this actually looks like but just think about you know as a result of the conversations that you've had here, what might this communities of practice notion mean to you. Were we thinking about sub projects? Is something has something occurred to you you really love to work on and that you'd love to cultivate together with other people? So thank you for listening. I was just wondering um like how do we build a community without making it without make putting up extra barriers. Like when people see oh it's already a community like I can't join type of thinking? I think there's a there's definitely a balance to be struck here so we need to create a strong enough sense of identity that we I guess a we self-identify as being part of something, we feel committed to it, we want to keep coming back, we want to work together but we also need to think about you know having a certain humility that maybe as we start working on these things we realize we don't have all the voices around the table yet and that we actually need to have pathways through which people can come and join. So these are not intended to be static entities. So for example let me give an example. At AAAS we have a social media working group meets Monday morning 11:00 a.m. and that transects across all the dreaded silos, so it's various editors, various program directors, and so on, all of whom don't have enough time on their own to keep up with all the changes in social media. So they join this working group once a week, one, to share current campaigns things that are going on so that everybody else in the organization who's online knows about it but, two, to talk about the changes. Oh Twitter's made yet another tweet. Oh well Instagram now lets you do this and so by coming together in that group they learn about that thing in a quick way once a week. That's their community of practice but the point to your question then is that's a flexible domain right. People are going to leave and move on and do other jobs, new people are going to join the organization, it's totally fine that those new hires then come and integrate into that community of practice. You know it should be visible enough that people know where the front door is and then welcoming enough that if you have a you know a reason to be there and something that you want to contribute that you're able to come in and integrate with those activities. Hi Lou, I'm Kyle from Guerilla Science and academic stand up. I wanted to touch on something and I kind of want to bring it out to the room that you mentioned and it's the reflective practice and I feel like I don't actually know how often people do it in their activities and and it's different from debriefs. It's completely different from debriegs and sharing in in meetings and team meetings and I'm kind of curious like for you who straddled the worlds of both UK science outreach and the US. science outreach how have you seen it and then maybe in the discussions that be great to talk about that. Yeah I mean I think it's so, what's nice about about this meeting at least for me from from the perspective that I'm viewing it from is that we've intentionally baked in those moments of reflection here. In the fellowship program that I run, we do a week-long training week in January and we cram their brains full of all the theory about communities but every afternoon we take an hour and a half to just let people think. We create a basic worksheet of prompt questions that they're free to use to help or completely ignore and discard but it's like think about how their stuff applies to you and think about how what we are doing together as a group is either helping or hindering or revealing to you things that you hadn't thought about before maybe even in the way in which you interact or or try and work with this information. So I really think baking in reflection like this, like coming together and talking about all those different experiences it is just a way of giving us that pause to sort of inhale exhale and then reengage. I mean again it's it's a structural thing in terms of how we create it it may be I've seen it done in various different ways I've seen some communities have a Monday work out loud session for example. It's totally open ended, it's online if you want you can come in there and use it as an accountability thing, as an open reflection thing where you say this is what I'm worried about working on or doing this week. That's a a simple structural way of doing reflection. The way we do with our worksheets in our fellows week, that's more structured and more elongated because we specifically want them to figure out how to apply the the learnings back in their home organizations. We could do this on a larger scale by coming together once a year and having reflection baked into what we are doing as part of that meeting so it looks like different things in different places. Stu Ravnick with UT Southwestern and I apologize if this question is overly naive. What is the relationship between a potential group like this with the already existing group of NABI and I'm not trying to be hard about it it just is it useful to have something completely separate or is it useful to actually integrate more strongly or have a sub working group? Yeah and I think I think those are completely valid questions and I would say that NABI is not the only organization that is thinking about communities of practice in this space right. There are there are multiple ones AAAS convenes one as well. I think part of this is being quite realistic about what it is that we as individuals want to achieve right, that we we are all very busy people, we cannot be fully present in multiple different places at the same time. So it's really about finding finding your tribe, finding your people to do the thing that you want to work on and I personally don't necessarily think that it matters who the convening organization is and I don't necessarily think those convening organizations have to be in competition with each other and I'm sure they wouldn't describe themselves as such. So I think they can be interrelated but we should also be realistic about not expecting people to be as engaged in every location although have visibility on what is going on in the different spaces.