Date: February 11, 2009
Speaker: John Smith — CPsquare
Can a community design its own digital habitat? Can a professional design a habitat on behalf of a community? Designing for a community is much harder than designing for a solitary individual. A digital habitat includes all the tools and the practices that enable a community to work and reproduce itself. It’s produced collectively, even though it’s experienced individually. This talk will explore how digital habitats vary across different contexts such as a company intranet, a mostly face-to-face community like CHIFOO, and a mostly online community like Planet Ubuntu. We’ll discuss some case studies of communities and the evolution of their digital habitats, exploring fundamental design tensions, kinds of tool integration, and the nature of technology stewardship.
Download the meeting notes as a .pdf provided by Ronald Barrett
See the meeting slides on SlideShare
About the Speaker
John D. Smith is a coach, leader, evaluator, and technology steward for communities of practice. He helps communities, their leaders, and their sponsors with the design and production of community events, through community self-assessments and the selection, configuration, and use of technologies. John is the community steward for CPsquare, an international community of practice on communities of practice. His clients include corporations, universities, foundations, and non-profit organizations around the globe. He is the co-author of the forthcoming book, Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities, which he has been working on with Etienne Wenger and Nancy White for five years. He has been working full time with communities of practice and teaching online for the past 10 years.
John is trained in dialog, evaluation, and data analysis. He worked at the University of Colorado as a planner, institutional researcher, administrator, and technologist for 20 years. He received a Bachelor’s degree from St. John’s College and a Master’s degree in planning and architecture from the University of New Mexico. He was born and raised in Humacao, Puerto Rico.