Our reporter, David Friel, has been speaking to some community of practice (CoP) facilitators about their experiences of running and being part of an online community. Here he talks to Brian McClory, Facilitator of the Edinburgh Local Practitioners' Forum, about creating a social work hub and the ongoing challenge of getting people to take part.
NAME: Brian McClory
POSITION: Early Intervention Worker, City of Edinburgh Council
CoP: Facilitator of the Edinburgh Local Practitioners' Forum
CoP CREATION DATE: October 28, 2009
CURRENT MEMBERS: 33
Q. Brian, can you begin by giving some background to your own CoP and the purpose of it?
A. All across the Edinburgh area, there are local practitioners involved in social work. We are a pretty diverse bunch and we deal with a variety of people – children, old folks and offenders among them. I felt we needed a hub, somewhere to share information and documents, so we created the Edinburgh Local Practitioners' Forum CoP. Ordinarily, we don't meet with each other all the time, so we felt that this would fulfil our needs.
How did you hear about the CoP facility?
I can't actually remember. We had looked about at different sites and I think someone pointed us in the direction of the CoP site. Quite specifically, we were looking for a space to store documents that would allow anyone to go in and look at them. We also wanted a platform to discuss those documents and work on them together. We wanted to share ideas and have a forum that would enable us to share and develop our thinking. The library facility on the CoP site is ideal for us. We needed something that was easy to access and we liked the idea of creating our own community, and informing people about what is going on.
Has your own CoP fulfilled its original purpose?
A. It has. We have a number of documents up there that people can access and we have been able to bounce ideas about as well. It's nice to be able to look at our list of members and see who is interested. There are people who don't ever to get to meet each other, so it brings them together. It allows us to identify a core group, even though it's not used as much as we would like it to be. We knew from the outset that we'd have to make at as purposeful as possible to attract members, so the potential is there to grow. As our organisation grows, there is definitely potential for the CoP to develop.
You say the CoP isn't used as much as you would like. Has it been difficult to engage people and get them involved?
Yes. Our membership is diverse and it's been difficult to find a common focus for us all. People are interested in their own work issues, so we can go off on tangents from our main issues. The CoP helps us keep track of the debates that go on. Overall, though, it's been difficult to get people involved. We have more people attending our regular forum meetings than are involved in the CoP. Getting them to move from a meeting where they can discuss things in person to doing the same thing online is a hurdle.
Have you tried different methods to get over that hurdle in a bid to get more members involved with the CoP?
We've just pestered people and told them that documents are available. At the end of our forum meetings, we highlight the site and what it can do. Normally, we then get a surge of new members and we're sitting at around the 35 mark just now. It's a significant proportion of the practitioners who attend the meetings, but it's not all of them. We have a job to do on this front. There has to be a purpose for them to want to go and visit the site.
The CoP allows you to store documents. Do you not find that then leads to debate and discussion among members?
We're a young group. The idea of the CoP was originally floated and people joined in. Practitioners across the country are looking at their role and it's useful to have a repository for material. These documents are not in the bottom of someone's filing cabinet. They are there to allow us to form ideas, but it's difficult to maintain a momentum of discussion with such a small group of people with diverse interests.
If more of the practitioners did join and actively contributed to the CoP, do you feel that would be more beneficial for everyone?
Of course it would. In terms of social work practitioners in Edinburgh, there are potentially hundreds, possibly thousands, who could be members. Only a small proportion of the practitioners attend the forum meetings, so potentially there are a lot more people who could get involved with the CoP.
Having used the CoP site for the last year, what would you say are the positive and negative aspects of it?
Having to log on seems to be a problem for some people. They just want to be able to go to a site and start contributing, like they do on Facebook and Twitter. I'm only talking here about people who are internet-savvy, which narrows the field slightly. For those who are happy to log on, having to navigate those extra few clicks to find our site seems to be a problem. The actual layout of the main site is good and the toolkits are useful. It's also useful to see recent activity and new members. It all seems logical and easy to understand, but it's just about getting the balance right for people. You can't please all of the people all of the time. It's difficult to get these things right.
Is there anything specific you would change about the site?
Personally, I haven't found it difficult to navigate, but I often wonder what it looks like to people who aren't used to going on to this type of site. I put myself in their shoes and try to look at what they will think when they first go on to the site. Is it easy for them? I can see the anxiety in their faces when I ask them to go online, register their details and get involved. It's about getting people used to going into these sites, but I don't have any bright ideas about how you would do this. It would also be useful to find out how much traffic there is towards the different areas of our CoP. How many people are visiting and what documents they are looking at? It would be gratifying to know that people are actively using the site, even if they are not contributing.
Leaving aside technical issues, is it more about encouraging people to embrace the idea of using social media?
Yes. There is a general reluctance, but I think people also have to have a purpose to go and look something up. Yet, when they do that, to then put their thoughts in writing is a different thing. If they are directly addressing one or two people, that's fine. If they are putting it out there and don't know who is looking at it, that's another thing. I think there's just a general wariness about the internet for a certain group of people.
Your own CoP is called the Edinburgh Local Practitioners' Forum. Would there be any scope for this to go national in the future?
We've discussed this at our meetings. It would be really useful to have a national site and there are moves afoot to create something like that. A significant amount of the work we do is common to other practitioner forums. In every local authority, people are looking at the same issues and coming up with ideas, so it would be nice to have a national site – with sub-sites for individual areas. At the moment, we are duplicating effort and it would be good to have a look at what other people do. There are different approaches in the various practitioner forums across the country, so a structured approach would help. We have common documents and common ideas, so it would be good to be able to discuss all that with each other and share material.
