Ed Mitchell: Platform neutral

I&DeA: CoP facilitator’s workshop

Having been invited by Steve Dale and the I&DeA communities team to do a presentation at their CoP facilitators’ workshop, I spent a fantastic day at IDeA central, working with the IDeA facilitators and discussing all things related to Communities (on and offline) and knowledge sharing.

We did some excellent networking and knowledge sharing, effectively facilitated in the main by Caron and Michael from IDeA, and I met some great people, as well as got very motivated by what The NSCL are doing with their online communities.

I have put my slideshow up for sharing here on the slideshare site (I also cheated a bit as I had too much to say so I printed out a few threads from their CoP and annotated them and put them on the wall).

There were a few questions - the one I didn’t get to really get my teeth into was the group who never meet offline and don’t find it neccesary (NCSL). One of my beliefs is that communities benefit enormously from physical meet-ups; my paper for Online Information last year with Dan Dixon was all about this (available from the ‘about ed‘ page), so I was sorry not to bash that one out… maybe another day!