Announcing: KM4dev workshop on CoPs in development, Seattle April 6-7, 2017

Knowledge Management for Development (KM4Dev) is a community of international development practitioners who are interested in knowledge management and knowledge sharing issues and approaches. Please see below the initial announcement for the CoPs in development workshop. For more information, you can contact me (lucie.lamoureux@mksp.eu).

Communities of Practice in Development Cooperation: the heaven, the hell and the alternatives...

• What is the state of CoP practice in internationaldevelopment cooperation? What is working? What is not working? Why?
• What elements of CoP practice or a “CoP perspective”are useful beyond/outside of a CoP structure? (I.e. social learning, communityleadership, etc.)
• What alternative structures are possible/havebetter traction and in which contexts? (I.e. networks with nodes that get activated when needed.)How do we know what to use and when?

• How do we evaluate and assess? What insightsand practices are emerging, like the Wenger-Trayner Value Creation framework?

We will gather for two days, April 6-7 in Seattle, Washington State, USA.

Day One will be a participant driven day to share experiences, help each other and identify questions, resources and ideas to share out to the wider KM4Dev global network.

Day Two we are fortunate to have Beverly and Etienne Wenger-Trayner, KM4Dev members, lead a full day workshop on the Value Creation Framework. (See more below). We will invite non KM4Dev members to attend the second day, and they are ALWAYS welcome to join day 1 if they are interested. We have not identified a venue, and thus capacity constraints. We will have a "I'm interested" sign up when we send the "save the date" next week.

Together the two days will provide space for weaving a wide set of practices and experiences around communities of practice, and the development of a specific evaluation practice for communities and networks.

Specifics of the Day 2 Workshop: Learning to make a difference: a framework

Etienne and Bev Wenger-Trayner

http://wenger-trayner.com/resources/publications/evaluation-framework/

The value created by learning in communities of practice or networks is not always easy to articulate in ways that make sense to participants, sponsors, and stakeholders. Yet it is something that needs to be done, not only for monitoring and evaluation, but also for optimizing the learning of the community.

We have developed a “value-creation framework” that focuses on how social learning makes a difference in the world via its effect on practice. The framework helps structure convincing accounts of the value of social learning by framing learning in terms of different cycles of value creation and loops between them. It integrates quantitative and qualitative data and can be used by professional evaluators as well as participants.

The framework is relevant through the lifecycle of a community or network. It can be used for articulating aspirations/conditions and risk/mitigation pairs for planning purposes. Closing ongoing value-creation loops between activities and practice then helps members fine-tune their learning as they go. And combining value-creation stories with monitored indicators brings rigor to the process of showing the value to participants and stakeholders. While originally developed for social learning in communities of practice and networks, the framework has been adopted for other contexts where social learning takes place, such as projects, workshops, and conferences.

We will present the framework and then take people through each of its cycles in relation to a project they are working on (or are about to start). It will be a chance to experience the usefulness of thinking of social learning as cycles of value-creation by applying the discipline of the framework to a familiar context.