This post features a short video of Etienne Wenger who answers questions about low participation rates in a community of practice. Etienne Wenger is a world renowned theoretician – practitioner on communities of practice.

I sit on a number of committees that address pressing community concerns. My view is that committees are close cousins to communities of practice and we can learn from our cousins.

From poverty & homelessness to engaging youth at risk, these committees are attempting to bring about positive social change in my community. As long as I’ve been sitting on committees, usually coordinated by a lead non profit agency or a network of non profit organizations, I continually hear the wish that more “service users” be at the table to help determine the results of our planning.

This wish to include users could be street youth, mental health consumer survivors, injection drug users, homeless individuals or just neighbourhood citizens who are interested in bettering the community.

My view is that having people that your organization serves at the planning table or committee can be useful and productive. Unfortunately or not surprisingly, participation from consumers just doesn’t happen very often or very effectively.

To me it seems like the implied message when committee members say “why aren’t more youth (take your pick of consumers) at the table” is that the Committee isn’t very credible or by planning without consumers, your work lacks reliability. That said, I don’t believe that when these people (consumers) are not at your planning or committee table that their absence is a sign that your work is not valid or relevant.

When I listened to Etienne Wenger speak about low participation rates in a community of practice, it struck me that his explanation fits very closely to how I am thinking about the issue of consumer participation.

What I like about Etienne Wenger’s brief video is his suggestion that we (as committees or planning tables) need to reflect more about our need to have consumers at our planning table and understand (and accept) that our domain may have little interest to their situation . The other suggestion is to look more closely at our methods for engaging different levels of participants in our community of practice, (committee or planning table) and accept that people can contribute to the work at different levels of participation.

What do you think about the question of consumer involvement in committee or planning work?

Brent Uncategorized cop consumer committee planning