STAMINA Working Group

Semble

A social knowledge tool for research trails, built on ATProto

Outline – Team knowledge base & wiki

A modern team knowledge base for your internal documentation, product specs, support answers, meeting notes, onboarding, & more…

A model for nesting connected groups with communities of practice

In the new edition of my book, Building Successful Communities of Practice, I share insights into community size and interactions. I've been using this theory with clients to create nested layers that include communities of practice that serve as a model for their organisation.

Facilitation Techniques and Workshop Activities | Library

Hundreds of group facilitation activities for workshops, meetings and training sessions. Find the best team building activities, energisers, process facilitation and leadership development...

Free Knowledge Institute

Building social capacity through shared knowledge and technology

A Department of Methodology: A feasible framework to integrate the applied practice of multidisciplinary support teams

High performance sport organisations employ multidisciplinary sport science teams to develop athlete preparation and performance. However, challenges have been identified with respect to cohesion, communication, integration, ineffective knowledge translation, role clarity, confusing language, and conflicting methodologies. A Department of Methodology (DoM) has been proposed as a conceptual framework seeking to address these issues. To move the DoM beyond conceptualisation towards professional practice, this study aimed to establish expert consensus for the implementation of a DoM within applied high performance contexts. Eighty professionals with expertise in multidisciplinary teams completed a three-round, online Delphi survey. In Round One, participants answered 16, open-ended questions across four categories: (1) Coordinating activity through shared principles and language; (2) Communicating coherent ideas; (3) Designing practice landscapes; and (4), General questions of feasibility. Results highlight the importance of building a shared language, establishing common principles, working collaboratively, facilitating continuous knowledge exchange, and designing practice tasks collaboratively. New knowledge is contributed for advancing conceptualisation of a DoM framework by exploring consensus on a range of theoretical- and practitioner-informed recommendations for the successful implementation of a DoM in high-performance sports organisations.

Stigmergic Collaboration: A Theoretical Framework for Mass Collaboration

"This thesis presents an application-oriented theoretical framework for generalised and specific collaborative contexts with a special focus on Internet-based mass collaboration. The proposed framework is informed by the author's many years of collaborative arts practice and the design, building and moderation of a number of online collaborative environments across a wide range of contexts and applications. The thesis provides transdisciplinary architecture for describing the underlying mechanisms that have enabled the emergence of mass collaboration and other activities associated with 'Web 2.0' by incorporating a collaboratively developed definition and general framework for collaboration and collective activity, as well as theories of swarm intelligence, stigmergy, and distributed cognition. "Accompanying this creative arts thesis is a DVD-Rom which includes offline versions of the three Internet based collaborative environments designed, built and implemented in accordance with the frameworks for digital stigmergy and mass collaboration developed in the written work. The creative works in conjunction with the written thesis help to explore and more rigorously define the collaborative process in general, while testing the theory that stigmergy is an inherent component of collaborative processes which incorporate collective material production. "Supported by a range of contemporary examples of Internet activity, including the accompanying creative works, it is found that stigmergy is a deeply rooted mechanism inherent in not only traditional material collaborative processes, but a range of emerging online practices which may be broadly categorised as digital stigmergic cooperation and collaboration. This latter class enables the extreme scaling seen in mass collaborative projects such as Wikipedia.org, open source software projects and the massive, multiplayer environment, Second Life. This scaling is achieved through a range of attributes which are examined, such as the provision of a localised site of individualistic engagement which reduces demands placed upon participants by the social negotiation of contributions while increasing capacity for direct and immediate creative participation via digital workspaces. Also examined are a range of cultural, economic and sociopolitical impacts which emerge as a direct result of mass collaboration's highly distributed, non-market based, peer-production processes, all of which are shown to have important implications for the further transformation of our contemporary information and media landscape."

Commons Computer

A modern team knowledge base for your internal documentation, product specs, support answers, meeting notes, onboarding, & more…

Avoiding Digital Productivity Traps - Cal Newport

​Last week​ in this newsletter, I summarized some interesting results from ​a study​ that analyzed the behavior of 164,000 knowledge workers. It found that introducing ... Read more

The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology might Benefit Each Other

The need for an integrated social constructivist approach towards the study of science and technology is outlined. Within such a programme both scientific facts and technological artefacts are to be understood as social constructs. Literature on the sociology of science, the science-technology relationship, and technology studies is reviewed. The empirical programme of relativism within the sociology of scientific knowledge and a recent study of the social construction of technological artefacts are combined to produce the new approach. The concepts of `interpretative flexibility' and `closure mechanism', and the notion of `social group' are developed and illustrated by reference to a study of solar physics and a study of the development of the bicycle. The paper concludes by setting out some of the terrain to be explored in future studies.

The Technological Construction of Social Power

This essay presents a theory of the role of technology in the distribution and exercise of social power. The paper studies how technical artefacts and systems are used to construct, maintain or st...

Theory and Memory: Two Forces Shaping Software Team Knowledge

How insights from cognitive science and social psychology explain why software knowledge is so hard to preserve

Peer Production in Citizen Science: A Community-Centered Approach on the Example of Personal Science

Citizen science encompasses a wide range of practices where online collaboration for knowledge production plays a significant role. However, the study of forms of online collaboration other than crowdsourcing in citizen science has remained largely unexplored. This thesis aims to fill this gap by investigating peer production as a form of collaboration in online citizen science communities of practice. First, peer production theory was operationalized as a working model and used to analyze collaboration in citizen science case studies. This was followed by a comprehensive participatory design process for a specific use case involving the personal science community of practice. This process resulted in the creation of the “Personal Science Wiki”, an online space for consolidating community knowledge through peer production. Subsequently, a usability and card sorting study identified and resolved issues with the wiki implementation, and provided insights into mental models and content requirements regarding self-research knowledge. The lessons learned from the participatory design process were generalized as process recommendations for designing peer production solutions and knowledge management systems with communities of practice.