European Community of Practice

(for the full report, please see the attachments)

Overview

October saw two major events - the EU Open Day workshop and the Lisbon workshop. There was also a Steering Group meeting for preparing recommendations for ESF decision-makers.

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Reflections and next steps
There was a lot of work carried out in October, both in terms of organising and facilitating the events, and also on reporting the events and in preparing the toolbox. I learned some significant lessons from social reporting that also surface questions about the nature of this community of practice and about the online tools for the community. What follows is some of the learning plus a recommendation for future similar situations.

EU workshop
As with the process of preparing the workshop last year, much of the learning happened in the steering group in the process of preparing the content and activities. I think that the workshop itself, while of some value to the audience, was very context specific.
Recommendation: in future workshops I would keep the structure of the workshop simpler, bearing in mind that the audience were not very familiar with EQUAL. The post-it notes for comments and suggestions was very interesting and could have been used as a start of conversations online.

Website and its organisation
The life-cycle of this comunity of practice is drawing to a close, and there is little value in making any major investment in changing the website. However, it is worth noting that the value of a Drupal site being used as a blogging tool has not been fully taken advantage of at any time. For example, the social reporting of the event was carried out on a page inside the “Event reports” rather than as tagged blogposts on the front page. The exectations of people who use this site is that it is more a publishing or broadcasting tool rather than as a co-created space for inviting people into the community or of carrying conversations one step further. I am the only person who is able to use the space, which should count as a weaknesses in the CoP’s activities.
Recommendation: Given the level of online activity and interest of steering group members in online tools, the platform is probably rather ambitious. There needs to be a team of people doing the work of the facilitation and site maintenance, including dealing with the smap.

Social Reporting
The Lisbon workshop was a good opportunity to continue refining the social reporting toolbox. Here are some of the lessons from about social reporting from this event:

What is social reporting? Social reporting is a way of deepening conversations and is not a way of producing accurate reports of “what happened”. This is a different approach to the traditional idea of broadcasting results of an event and is not always apparent when people are first introduced to it. Some people whose conversational videos appeared on the website were concerned that their conversation was not appropriate and even asked for a Power Point presentation to substitute the video. Part of the reason for this is that the final outcome of the social reporting was to be published on the official CoPIM website. This meant that on the one hand people were being told that this was informal and conversational. On the other hand, their conversations were published on an official site, which gave the idea that they should be producing the official line.
Recommendation: have a separate online space for particular events, which are linked to from the main site, but which are not part of the official site.

Time.  Social reporting takes much more time than I ever anticipated. Filming, recording and interviewing are the least time-consuming activities in the social reporting process. I greatly underestimated the time it takes for post-production work, including:
Uploading files
compressing files to make them more easily uploadable and downloadable;
preparing captions for the videos and audio files, with text that puts it into context;
Editing videos;
Embedding code into the site;
Bringing closure to the conversations started by the social reporting.
Recommendation: plan and budget (people) resources for doing these tasks.

Roles: facilitation and social reporting. It was very helpful dividing the roles between facilitation and social reporting, allowing both David and I share in the planning and follow-up of each task but focusing on the activities of just one during the event.
Recommendation: pay attention to the different roles of people involved in the social reporting process.

Dissemination and voluntary social reporters.
The participation of voluntary social reporters was a very satisfactory element of the process. They were keen to learn what to do in order that they could use it in their own practice. Since the Lisbon workshop two voluntary social reporters have talked with me how they have used the concept and activities in carrying out their own event. It could have been more productive and interesting for them if we had organised more preparation for the social reporters, involving them in some of the pre-and post-event activities.
Recommendation: if possible have a skype conversation or meeting with social reporters before the event to engage them in the process at an earlier stage in the process.