Short story... a bad example
From Worklearntogether.org
In Italy the phenomenon of communities of practices is developing and evolving. In order to identify potential target groups to establish a Cop, it’s important to cooperate with public and political authorities and institutions, that are Regions, Local Sector Organizations, Consortia. They can be the ideal referents and interface to reach a great number of little enterprises which could be interested in participating in a Cop. In Italy the main sector organization in the field of tourism are Confcommercio www.confcommercio.it and Confesercenti www.confesercenti.it. They are national organization with regional and local branches. They represent enterprises as hotels, rural houses, farmhouses, camps, Spa etc. In case of Virtual Cops it would be important involve these organizations and linking the portal of the community to their web sites/platforms as well as to the portals of Consortia and groups of enterprises. This is what it would be important to do, but.... this is the hard: in fact these organization are very strucurated, even beaurocratic and they usually move very slowly. To take a decision is a very articulated process and it is necessary to spend a lot of time...and if you don't monitor the situation, everything will file away and forget. Even the referent can also change and you have to call and searching the "new referent" for days. To tell the truth, the problem is to find people and referents really interested in sperimenting new forms od cooperating work as COPs. The long and the short of this is that to be prepared to deal with resistance is a must, but is also very important to take into consideration that:
- To sensibilize organization and peolple of the adantage of Cops could be a long process and it is necessary to start with time and patience;
- It is necessary to identify a refent (o refrenrents)in orer to discuss you project
- Even with a referent it is necessary to maintain contacts and monitor the state of the art of the project very often
- It is necessaru to define a common agenda to develop the different activities and to respect deadlines
- It is necessary to define real and concrete objective to be reach in order not to be too theoretic
- And LAST BUT NOT LEAST...It is very important to manage the great resouce that is TIME!!
