A: Membership of the community

How do you experience being a member of this community?

So it was a bit like an imposter syndrome. I mean ‘what are we doing here?’ .. You know I’m not really a JISC person.

It’s useful to feel part of a community that isn’t specific to my institution.

Perhaps what I’ve found most useful is not the intended outcome – a JISC funded project – but the community itself and the opportunity to use it as a sandpit for new ideas.

…excited from the beginning about the diverse backgrounds of members and their willingness to talk and share ideas.

There’s no single community, there’s the hippies and the rockers.. They are only a single community because they happened to be geographically quite close. It does mean that you get some great moments when you move from place to place.

In a JISC project you (normally) just get on with it yourself. But now your project is one of a number of projects and you find yourself in conversation online with people about the project and how it can impact on us and vice versa.

I think it was around the time of the Manchester event that I realised we were building a community rather than joining one.

finding points of contact with those they might not have expected to have common ground

B: Programme participation

How do you experience participation in this programme?

It’s been helpful to share out multiple channels among project team members in order to participate fully

The amount of catching up that would be required on a fast moving communication and information provision becomes so overwhelming that it becomes a deterrent from engagement.

We have all been quite busy doing our own stuff so would not see all that much need to get involved with other (Emerge) people. Like Glastonbury, it’s a bit muddy, a lot of

cool stuff happening and I can’t get to it all.

I can’t say to JISC ‘sorry we didn’t deliver half our outputs - but I did turn up for an Emerge thing’.

I felt like a snail – I was crawling along at my own pace and when I dropped into the Emerge community online I felt that the world was whizzing past me but I struggled to relate to what people where saying in the blogs to my own practice really.

There’s a bit of a tension as to whether we need more events or more time to get on with things.

C: Openness

How do you experience the openness and collaboration expected of a community based model of programme support?

I valued the openness of clusters within elgg, seeing what other clusters are forming.

What I would have liked to have done is cancel the competetive element.. I did have a couple of offline communications with people about “we can’t show you ours” or “I can’t come and talk to you about that as I’m already talking to that person over there”.

Emerge provides safe environment in which to talk and share

We have found Emerge useful .. The chance to find out what other people are up to (face to face, the many interesting blogs, the podcasts etc) and to share ideas in an open environment.

Seeing the big picture, it all happening out in the open

D: Social engagement

How do you experience the social, informal, fun parts of the programme?

For busy professionals the glue to bind a community is socially based

Serendipitous networking problematic for those expecting and familiar with more evenly paced conference type events with their clearly demarcated contexts and time frames for various levels of engagement.

It has validated the informal, social value of networked learning

Be sensitive to entertainment so that activities are always recognisably inclusive and do not alienate members with diverse cultural, religious and lifestyle backgrounds.

It really helps to do something that is just sociable before you start getting down to the discipline.

The 6 month coffee break

E: Shared repertoire

How do you experience the sharing and contributing to the repertoire? What and where is the knowledge/expertise of this group and how do you access it?

Emerging Mondays provided accessible method of distributing information and providing access to areas of expertise within the community

The knowledge is in the network – blogs as knowledge capital.

Sounding out ideas with other members who are

knowledgeable in the areas and subjects

The future of Emerge rests on it being valuable as a source of social and cultural capital where we grow understandings and represent cutting edge understandings.

The opportunity to move into this whole world of funding and research and the opportunity to sit down and talk to other people who are tuned into the sort of ideas that I was excited about was really beneficial to me

Everything from the Dragon’s Den was great

Have to bring yourself up to another level to contribute to serious conversations