Wikis need to be open to create just like documents to be useful. I need to be able to create one at will, just like a word doc. Why? Because most often we are using them as to-do lists for diff internal tasks.

One confusion - some wikis are also used to be a presentation page, eg. How-to Guide, a Topic Guide.

People need to know they can be just as disposable as a word document.

Also just because a wiki can look like a homepage (more than a word doc) and has a URL, it doesn’t necessarily make them official.

I left a comment over on you blog - indeed horizontal ownership (deploy) of enterprise social tools is important from the word go in order to best find a group that has the less bias, and is interested in ground zero needs and wants

I’m finding more and more that conversations about my blog posts are happening on Twitter.

Does anyone know how to port these twitter posts back to my blog as comments.

I don’t know much about change management directly, but I guess lots of my past posts touch on these aspects when I talk about culture and adoption

http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2008/10/30/post-km-enterprise-20-facilitation-and-complexity/
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2008/11/14/are-you-really-doing-enterprise-20/
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2008/11/11/knowledge-flow-networks/

Yeah there is a difference in “groups” and “communities”…the word “communities” denotes something larger. And true if people could create their own we would see more of these smaller communities forming, but unfortunately our software is not as easy as creating a facebook group.

Good point in separating the active from the inactive using 2 lists in the directory.

I came across your blog somehow in my surfings, and it really caught my attention. I’m a former librarian and information systems manager and consultant, so your areas of interest immediately caught my attention.

I dipped into this post in particular because the issue of introducing a management-mandated system (in this instance, community system) always brings up issues of organizational change, ie change in behavior patterns and ways of working, so I wondered what your thoughts were on the process. You touch on a lot of pithy issues. I hope that I’ll have time later to return to some of this with more substantive comments, but quickly, this in particular caught my attention:

>>At the moment our community requests are never for 5 or 6 people, they are always for an indended crowd of 20, 50 or 100, I don’t know why. What I want to see are real small and tight communities, at the moment I still think these types are still using emails. Somehow I have to make clear that communities can be tiny and are able to reject membership. that average about 6 or so in number. “Communities” as large entities form because of the association and aggregation of these smaller groups. Think of clubs and large organizations, that feel like a community to the members (VFW, Rotary Club, LPGA, whatever): no one walks in the door and feels embrace by the community at large, literally. Rather, they go with a friend, and meet two acquaintances, and are invited to lunch by a third, who introduces two of those newcomers to a committee chair who drafts a group of five to work on a project… etc.

I know I’m stating the obvious there in describing how people network socially, but it is at the heart of community and hidden by the semantics we use when we think of enterprise scale projects and implementation.

Because of this, I also think it is a big mistake to exclude users from starting groups at a whim. When you permit that, you will get the small team and the group of lunch buddies who help each other troubleshoot problems over their lattes and mochas. The group of five, indeed. Maybe relabeling, representing, or rethinking this as a team-building tool would help: teams don’t stay teams, when they work across disciplines and share expertise as well as social interactions easily, that is when they grow into a viable community in the true sense of the word. Management can direct that project teams (by definition large in number) use community tools, but the organic growth that guarantees a long-lived vital system is only going to come from the aggregation of many small parts.

There are ways to build in functions that mitigate against the empty group/empty community perceptions you mentioned. That’s a valid concern but I think easily addressed. For instance, a master list of communities for people to browse and pick from should show only those that have had activity in them over the last X period of time. Anything inactive longer than that doesn’t show by default, but can be accessed with a ’show all groups’ funtion - and yet again, listed in order with the most active groups at the top. And so on. It’s true that many will spawn and many will die of neglect, but you will also create the fertile ground you need for that fermentation process that leads to eager engaged adoption of a tool that is truly useful in everyday work life.

Good luck with your project! I also like your de.li.cious blog saves too, btw, and snagged a copy of your mini-widget with titles because I referenced some of your links in my own blog today. You can see that entry at http://www.deborahteramischristian.com.

regards,
-Teramis