Consider blogs as a community of practice

I am heading off to ALT-C 2007 tomorrow, as those of you who read this blog will be aware of. Apart from going over my slides and what I will be saying at 5, I have also taken the time to read some of the information on the ALT-C conference amplifier feed.

I have to say that, there are only some people posting about ALT-C, the rest seems to be about what people already have on their blogs. Even though a lot of this information is out of date, some of it is interesting. I have found some one linking to an article about blogs and communities of practice, from 2004. I think that the conference amplification is a form of blogs becoming communities of practice even if for only a short time (ie the time frame for the conference). All we need to do now is to try and maintain that community of practice some where. Even though I like the fluidity of the conference amplification system.

It leads me back to how we can build and maintain a community of practice for WebPA and whether we can organise to get an amplification going for an event that the Subject Centres are hoping to hold. But what are the next steps to holding on to that community of practice...

I have to say that some of the best conference amplification I have seen has been for the @media conferences. You can see the effects at Flickr and on technorati. May be I will be able to find similar examples for ALT-C by tomorrow.

Please let me know if you do blog about WebPA or you intend to mention us somewhere as I will then try to set up a 'feed of feeds' or even a Yahoo! pipe. But again this may be transient, rather than sustained...we need to develop a sustained amplification for our project.