In the May 2004 issue of the Muse we included a briefing paper about Communities of Practice (CoPs). We're pleased that CoP strategies are now on the development agendas of many organizations and are being recognized as a valuable piece of a succession planning strategy.

The software that supports CoP development, sometimes referred to as Social Software is also getting lots of attention. Briefly, a blog (short for Web log) is an individual's journal that is shared and annotated on the Web. Blogging is a simple concept but it has very quickly become widespread and has generated a lot of interest in the Knowledge Management community. Wikis are collections of Web pages that are freely editable by a community. Once again, the concept is simple, but Wikis are proving very valuable to virtual groups who need to work collaboratively. These is of course much more to say about blogs and wikis but my space is limited ... for more info about social software, blogs and wikis see the wikipedia.org entry on Social Software. Wikipedia is a community-developed encyclopedia built using a wiki!

So where do the team skills fit in? CoPs and virtual teams are very similar. They both comprise groups of people doing their best, using technology-mediated communication, to get something done. If virtual teams and communities of practice are going to really flourish and contribute to an organization's bottom line then providing access to appropriate technology is only part of the equation. Individual team and CoP members need to be equipped with some essential virtual team skills that allow them, and the team they belong to, to function effectively.

If you want to find out more about CoPs then we recommend the workshop taken by Dave in Spring 2003. The CoP foundations workshop organized and facilitated by CPSquare starts again on May 9th.

The Virtual Team Skills Inventory (VTSI) that we mentioned in the last issue of the Muse is now complete and we're looking for colleagues to try it out. The inventory provides a framework for constructive feedback to be shared within a team so as to maximize team learning and team performance.

Calliope Learning has made free eVouchers available to Muse readers who would like to try out the VTSI with a team they work with just now. This could either be a team that you are a member of or a team that you coach.

Create a login for yourself and then use the eVoucher:

musereader

This will allow you to setup a single VTSI assessment for up to ten team members and six external reviewers. In return we'd appreciate any feedback you have.

We send out a big thank you and congrats to four members of our LearningEdge (LE) community of practice for completing their graduate research projects with Royal Roads University in Victoria, Canada using LE. Alison Bichel, Maureen Ewing, Deborah Lang, and Faye White all spent hours of their time and we appreciate their using LE! Over the next few months, we will be highlighting their work.

In this edition we want to highlight Deborah Lang's project "Development of a Best Practices Repository for the Learning Signature", a project that looked at identifying learning best practices and how they contribute to building a learning organization. We have prepared a short executive summary which you can download. We will be working with the results of Deborah's project to develop a searchable online database, which will be available for our certified LE consultants.

Here are the scheduled workshops for 2005:

Toronto - May 9-11
Vancouver - October 3-5
Toronto - November 21-23

Please contact us if you'd like more information about one of these or would like to suggest other dates and/or venues.