Communities

communities of interest and practice

Community Portals

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Looking back at lessons learned from community portals (2005) I would say that the transactional portal is the only one that still makes any sense to me:

Transactional: sites which are accessible, complete, thoughtful, and coherent; and with more than one type of on-line interaction (e.g. payment, application, consultation, bookings).

RSS has blown up the content-only portal funded through advertising but the wide adoption of Twitter is giving content publishers a new push mechanism to get eyeballs to their sites. I don’t follow anyone on Twitter who only publish their recent blog posts, that’s what a feed reader is for. However, some people may prefer getting updates via Twitter. I wonder if this will significantly change the use and utility of RSS?

Back to portals. I’ve found that checking out the various portal/community sites that I belong to is rather tedious and am consciously avoiding requests to join more communities. Not sure if community portal overload syndrome is widespread but I think there’s a sea change happening. Are central portals dying, seeing a resurgence or best left for internal organizational use? I’ve noticed that proprietary portal software is still being sold for lots of money and there are several strong open source projects available too.

Are portals old tech or still a solid way to support communities and various types of online transactions?

Photo by yewenyi

Future of organizational learning and development

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On 21 April 2009 Corporate Learning Trends will be organizing sessions, speakers and workshops online; all for free. The main topic is the future of organizational learning and development. Follow the link to make any suggestions on topics of interest, format, times and delivery modes.

The previous sessions were well-attended and the whole togetherLearn gang is helping out with this one.

Visit Corporate Learning Trends and Innovation 2008

Come join in the conversations and learning.

Perpetual Beta

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It hadn’t really occurred to me before that pilots are an almost inextricable aspect of Enterprise 2.0. Of course the ‘iterate and refine’ concept can be implemented in other ways, but I think it’s fair to say that organizations absolutely need to get good at running pilots, if they’re not already there. It is a key facet of the path that leads to improved organizational performance.

So says Ross Dawson in pilots as a key instrument for improving organizational performance in a complex world. If you take the cynefin approach for working in complex environments you first Probe then Sense and then Respond in order to develop emergent practice. There are no good or best practices that will work for  your context in a changing complex environment, so probing (AKA: piloting or Beta releases) is necessary to see what works. However, changing from a highly designed approach to an agile method is difficult. I previously recommended that instructional design adopt agile methods but even in the programming world, letting go of old ways is difficult as Sara Ford at Microsoft explains in how I learned to program manage an agile team after six years of waterfall.

There is no silver bullet solution to running the human performance side of an organization in the complexity of a highly networked economy with ubiquitous access to information and people. New tools keep being developed that can change the way we work and learn. Today it’s Twitter and tomorrow it will be something else. Approaching enterprise performance from the perspective of perpetual Beta is a way to maintain your sanity in all of this change. The values and culture can remain stable while the tools and practices keep evolving to take advantage of the situation.

Pilots are key to improving organizational performance but the culture of perpetual Beta is critical. Perpetual Beta is my attitude toward learning – I’ll never get to the final release and my learning will never stabilize. I’ve also realized that organizations with a similar attitude are much easier to work with than those that believe that we will reach some future point where everything stabilizes and we don’t need to learn or do anything new. I think that point is called death.

Protesting infringement on privacy and free speech in Canada

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Ontario Court Orders Website To Disclose Identity of Anonymous Posters

Protection for anonymous postings is certainly not an absolute, but a high threshold that requires prima facie evidence supporting the plaintiff’s claim is critical to ensuring that a proper balance is struck between the rights of a plaintiff (whether in a defamation or copyright case) and the privacy and free speech rights of the poster. I [Michael Geist] cannot comment on the postings themselves (and I recognize that Warman has been a frequent target online) but I fear that the high threshold seems to have been abandoned here, with the court all-too-eager to dismiss the privacy considerations associated with mandated disclosure by not engaging in an analysis as to whether the evidentiary standard was met.

We need very high thresholds before our rights can be trampled.

It’s time to black-out in protest.

Starting an Online Community

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There are several factors that should be looked at when creating a collaborative working/learning space. I’ve previously referred to Column Two’s three tiers of collaboration – Capacity, Capability & Strategy and it’s a good model to start with. Part of capacity are the existing processes and culture of collaboration while capability includes the best tools for the job. It’s not easy for a group of individuals, who do not know each other, to work collaboratively from the onset. It is even more difficult to ask that this collaboration occur online when the participants are not in the habit of working on the Internet. The practice of sharing needs to be joined with the tools that work for the culture. Finally, strategy includes the leadership, direction and project management of getting things going to work collaboratively online.

It’s important to get participants/members first used to processing their information flow online. A framework such as Personal Knowledge Mastery can be used, but each person must be given time to practice, connect and get feedback. The community also needs to be nurtured, one relationship at a time, as the creators of Flickr realized:

A lot of our success came from George, the lead designer, and Caterina. Both of them spent a lot of time in the early days greeting individual users as they came in, encouraging them and leaving comments on their photos. There was a lot of dialogue between the people who were developing Flickr and their users to get feedback on how they wanted Flickr to develop. That interaction made the initial community very strong and then that seed was there for new people who joined to make the community experience strong for them too.

Because culture is slow to change I would recommend starting with the simplest tool-set possible. Turn off most functions and only enable new ones when people start asking for more. As with tools, the same minimization principle goes for content. It is more important to build relationships and to draft the right people than it is to build the best content. Community trumps content online. Therefore, the focus should be on building connections.

A model we used for a CoP prototype (the first of several to be implemented on a variety of ‘topics’) was based on these roles in the core team:

Process Lead (Communities) – Stays current on online communities, evaluates progress, helps members with knowledge-sharing, develops processes and records progress.

Recruiter (Early Adopter) – Identifies and connects with other potential Early Adopters.

Recruiter (Maven) – Identifies subject areas of interest to the community and finds knowledge or human resources.

Technical Lead – Identifies technologies and ensures that the community has the right tools.

Topic Lead – The ‘go-to’ person on all questions relating to implementation. This person is supported by the other core team members.

Disruptive business models already here

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The Great Disruption is on. Globalized, kleptocratic powers are trying to control the change by grabbing the monetary system while at the same time the Web has enabled empowering, grassroots initiatives like Kiva.org to spring up. As stock prices plummet and currency fluctuates, even the unwashed masses, who never understood derivatives, are realizing that money has no real value. That’s good because two types of organizations don’t need a lot of money.

First, a lot of Web services start with sweat equity and their service fees fuel organic growth with little need for investment until they are are already proven businesses. Second, natural enterprises, based on community, continue to spring up all over. Starting your own small business is one way to deal with down-sizing. In our town we have witnessed the launch of an organic bakery, a community supported agriculture association and a green builders cooperative in the past few years. All three are growing. At the same time, I’ve seen local web-based businesses going global with niche products and services.

A presentation from CFIB this week showed that 1) Farmers and 2) Small Business Owners are the most trusted professions in Canada. Investment bankers did not even make the list. So who is going to suffer from any future lack of talent, the big guys or the little guys? The big firms can only offer money, while smaller businesses usually offer lifestyle and a sense of doing something worthwhile. If we enter into a period of currency devaluation, then money will be of even less value. The barter system actually works at the local level.

In the networked, always-on workplace, community is king, as it has always been at the local level. Today, organizations, public, private & non-profit, need to connect with their communities. People are already doing this on the Web and it’s becoming unnatural to go to work and not be connected to our communities. Workers only surf the Web or play solitaire when they’re disconnected from their work. Keeping people connected and engaged is the great challenge, especially for larger organizations. This can be a role for the training department, but I’m not sure if most are up to it.

To weather the great disruption a successful organization will have to be more like 1) a web-based service company and 2) a small, community-based business. It will have to be nimble and remain small, or small-thinking. That means breaking down silos and giving autonomy to sub-organizations. It also means sharing and enabling people to connect on a human level, not with some document or policy. The future belongs to an organization that can think like a small business, where your word is your bond, and at the same time act as an inter-connected global citizen.

Catching the Zeitgeist

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From SocialCollider.net (via @gsiemens):

With the Internet’s promise of instant and absolute connectedness, two things appear to be curiously underrepresented: both temporal and lateral perspective of our data-trails. Yet, the amount of data we are constantly producing provides a whole world of contexts, many of which can reveal astonishing relationships if only looked at through time.

This experiment explores these possibilities by starting with messages on the microblogging-platform Twitter.

And here is what I found when looking at @hjarche on Twitter for the last week:

This visual shows that what we post (tweet) can take on a life of its own in the network and that we may not always consider this. We are not in control of our information once it’s on the Net.

Communities of Practice

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I’m reviewing my resources on communities of practice and synthesizing some of the articles I’ve come across and added to my social bookmarks or blogged about on my Communities Thread.

One of the best sources of practical knowledge on online community building is Anecdote from Australia. In Building a Collaborative Workplace, they discuss three types of collaboration – Team, Community and Network. As they say, “Our purpose is to provide an understanding of the type of culture required to support collaboration.”

Anecdote’s collaborative framework:

Another Australian resource I found via Jack Vinson is three tiers of collaboration from Column Two, a good model to examine organizational readiness regarding – Strategy, Capability & Capacity.

Peter Bond’s article, which I referred to in 2005, on Communities of Practice and Complexity is still worth reading to see how communities can be viewed from a biological perspective and that communities don’t have to continue forever:

This suggests that the process of CoP development be approached as if they were transitory organisational phenomena that may act, but only for a finite period, as the source of the motivation for change and as the vehicles for change.

My 2006 post on the failure of online communities has some good comments and is worth a read if you’re thinking of setting up an online community. I also posted on an unsuccessful community of practice case study. Even with these failures, some think that we may be hard-wired for collaboration (good comments on this one).

Last year I used the Company Command model for a community of practice prototype. The advice on who to get involved in building it was useful:

  1. Initial Core Team of two or three people who desire to share knowledge.
  2. Early Adopters who are members of the community that you are serving, especially those who are already well-connected.
  3. Mavens with deep knowledge in an area that is valued by the members.

For anyone interested in the technology, I discussed how to select social network platforms as we were conducting our Work Literacy workshops. A wider variety of tools are listed on Robin Good’s Mind Map of best online collaboration tools.

Seeing with new eyes

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The idea that training is not a separate function has already gained some momentum, with many internal departments called something like Learning & Development now. Luis Suarez, writes in Learning & Knowledge – Partners in Learning:

For a good number of years, both Knowledge Management and Learning have always been associated with one another and overlapping quite a bit. Plenty of organisations are eventually using terms like Learning & Knowledge to refer to that process of knowledge sharing and collaborating; and, in a way, with the emergence of social software within the corporate environment, I am sure we will be seeing both disciplines come together even more!

I commented on Luis’s post that learning, development, KM, OD, etc, should take what’s best from each and create a more pragmatic offering for the networked workplace. I see that web-based practitioners especially are already doing this kind of cross-pollination. Both Luis and I view ourselves as cross-practitioners, as do several of my colleagues. In our networked world there is a need for more inter-disciplinary cooperation as exponential innovations can occur when examining one field through the lens of another. Merging our fields of practice will let us see with new eyes.

The Community Manager

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In re-building the training function, we’ve recommended a move from content delivery to Connecting & Communicating. One role that will likely gain importance is that of Community Manager. As the electric media become embedded in our lives, we will all be constantly connected to many communities. Some of these will overlap.

The role of community manager in an organization will be to manage  organizational communities of practice, communities of interest and have an understanding of some of the other communities that touch each of us. In his Valence Theory of Organizations, Mark Federman identified “several specific forms of valence relationships that are enacted by two or more people when they come together to do almost anything; these are economic, social-psychological, identity, knowledge, and ecological.”

Effective collaboration brings all of these aspects into consideration. The communities we belong to address some or all of these valances. Workplace-related communities often address only the knowledge and economic aspects but as human beings we need more.

Because digital media are so easily reproduced and appropriated there are few walls between our online communities. Even our offline communities are getting digitally captured, by someone. Look at how difficult it is to maintain a clear line between LinkedIn and Facebook contacts. Even though many of us use the former for business and the latter for more personal communications, few are able to maintain two distinct groups of contacts. These lines will continue to blur (e.g. Twitter) and our online identities will be a composite of activities in several communities / teams / groups / networks.

The effective community manager will be less of a manager and more a well-connected node in many networks of importance to the organization. David Wilkins takes this a step further and says that the entire business should be run as a community:

It’s not about customer communities or workplace communties.  It’s about recognizing and fostering connections, and enabling information flow and information capture from multiple constituents.

If you can incorporate the best of eLearning; Human Performance Technology; Organizational Development; Knowledge Management; Communications and a touch of Marketing, then you may have the makings of a Community Manager. It seems like a pretty exciting place to be for the near future.