Making All Voices Count ’s Learnings On Communities of Practise

Ushahidi
Mar 16, 2018

A couple of months ago, my colleagues and I were having an interesting discussion on learning and how to gather and share learnings and building networks within the civic tech (Technologies within the civic sphere) sector. One of the topics that kept on arising is Communities of Practice and the kind integral part they have been able to play within the Making All Voices Count program (MAVC). This got me thinking, what exactly are Communities of Practise? What do they comprise of? And what sort of learnings has the program been able to get from its involvement in these?

The Making All Voices Count (MAVC) programme finds, funds, and learns from new ideas that harness the power of innovation and technology that support governments to be more effective, responsive and accountable. As a learning program, MAVC seeks to gather learnings in this sphere through different ways, one of the ways being supporting and hosting regular Community of Practise (CoP) gatherings of its grantees and other partners to reflect on issues and themes agreed to be of collective interest and importance. Since a CoP is not defined by the medium of which people connect, the program supports and hosts both online and offline Communities of Practise.

What is a Community of Practise and what characterises one?

While understanding what the MAVC program is about and it’s core reason of existence, I set to find out what exactly is a Community of Practise and what makes up a CoP. After vigorously searching the internet wanting to know more about CoPs, well I understood what a CoP was and what it meant but not in a way that I could transfer the same understanding to others, I came across this definition by Etienne Wenger:Communities of Practise can be described as groups of people who share a concern or passion of something they do and who interact regularly to learn how to do it better. The following are 3 main components that characterise a CoP:

Domain: This means that there is a shared area of interest or a shared learning interest among practitioners

Community: Members of these CoPs building relationships through indulging in joint activities

Practise: The community has to have actual practitioners in the field and build a shared repository of knowledge

The MAVC program further breaks down CoPs into two categories, i.e. Online CoPs and Offline CoPs

Online CoPs being those that foster online interactions that allow participants to act as learning partners in meaningful ways while Offline CoPs are those that face to face interactions allowing participants to act as learning partners in meaningful ways.

What did Communities of Practise mean to Making All Voices Count (MAVC)?

For MAVC, these Communities of Practice (CoPs) formed an integral part of brokering work as the program moved from regional management and support of grants to a country-based approach. MAVC’s aim was to use the Communities of Practice not only to provide its grantees with new opportunities for partnerships and sharing of lessons that might improve their projects, but also to support wider policy engagement at national level between all CoP members and their respective national governments or government institutions.

So what did the program learn with its involvement with Communities of Practise (CoPs)? CoPs bring about a different perspective in looking at civic tech issues and ways of addressing these issues. For example during the Ebola outbreak, a CoP in Liberia came up with a way of monitoring and reporting the EBola cases in the country. By displaying this kind of data on a map, health practitioners were able to locate the areas that might be having infected persons but have not yet received treatment.

Since MAVC was a program whose main aim was to support good governance, I found it interesting to learn that involving government as an individual might prove to be difficult. CoPs provide that sense of security in numbers, and governments tend to respond better to unified fronts as opposed to different individuals trying to relay the same information to government differently. However as the CoPs tend to enjoy their strength in numbers, it is important to note that growth in numbers for CoPs is important to allow for wider engagements and inclusivity, it is important to note that getting one fully united voice may be difficult to achieve for many reasons. Communities of practise also need to recognise how different their view of government engagement from the government’s view.

As a program, there were some CoPs that we helped initialise and others we found already existent and joined in. What we learnt from both experiences is that in order to be sustainable, CoPs need to be self starters. As much as support from the program is highly beneficial for them as it enables them to gain traction and momentum, it is important that these CoPs take upon themselves to keep those relationships and networks going. Granted, building a Community of Practise can prove to be challenging as is building any other kind of community from the ground up, therefore there is need for patience and persistence in the process. Getting those conversations going even after an online or Offline meeting can also be challenging and we found certain tools that could be very helpful in maintaining the conversations and relationships. Some of these tools include: Skype, Slack, Google Hangouts, WhatsApp groups.

References:

Making All Voices Count (MAVC) South Africa Community of Practise Report

Wenger and Trayner website: http://wenger-trayner.com/resources/online-communities-of-practice/