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A while ago I posted that size doesn’t matter when it comes to effective communities. You don’t need a lot of members to make a community of practice successful, you just need quality participation.

Whereas in a blog/micro blog social network you need lots of people in order to gain the network effect. That is, a network (individual centric) system like a blogosphere becomes more valuable as the number of players increases. The more bloggers there are, the more we have to read and learn, the more comments and linking result, and as a whole we have a richer distributed conversation. If there were only 5 bloggers in the world I would have not much to read, comment and link to…5 million diverse opinions are going to generate more material, discussion, points of view.

To re-iterate a community of practice does not necessarily become more valuable when the number of people increases…see fictional example:

“Our community was great, there were originally 10 of us that were of the same calibre, we had lots in common, we all trusted and relied on each other…now the community has 40 people, and it’s lost is attraction for me, there’s too much off topic content, and the conversations are too noisy and of lower quality, I really don’t know all these people…I liked the dynamic I had before with our original group, I was more prone to participate and felt much more comfortable among peers I trusted and had confidence in, we are thinking of branching off”

The thing about groups is that it’s a shared choice as it’s a shared space, whereas in a network it’s your own space, you just choose to ignore people, you only add friends to your contact list that you like or trust. Therefore you always keep the quality, at any time you can drop someone you lose interest in.

NOTE: Communities and networks are not substitutes, they both have unique purposes.

Why wikis have more adoption?

What sparked today’s post is a post from Sameer, 2009 is the year of Enterprise 2.0? Hold your horses….

In his post we see that Wikis are gaining more traction. I think this is because they are more:

• group based tools
• based around a task (an environment of certainty)
• help with process failure, and
• don’t require network effects like blogs and social networks
  …ie. wikis and forums don’t need lots of people to take off, all they require is a small group of people.

I recently left a comment on Stewart Mader’s blog about how my boss and I (and a couple of others) are using a wiki for everything lately…it’s so much easier and less messy pointing to a URL than emailing an attachment.
This is a social tool we are getting great value from, and all it took was a group of under five people.

Another reason wikis are taking off is that so many people at work want to make topic, workaround, best of, to-do pages. The nature of knowledge work is that we deal with uncertainty and unique situations, we can only document so many official processes/procedures; often we need to bend these processes and use our thinking and conversation to respond or get things done on the fly. This is why we are the people for the job as we use our minds to get things done, we are not programmed robots in a factory, work these days cannot be programmed by management, we need to respond and act to all the different situations that face us.
OK, so after that long speel, I guess I wanted to say that sometimes we may like to communally create our own informal procedures or workaround lists that contain the ways we responded to situations. Or a list that contains the best documents on a topic; these documents may be scattered in different repositories, and a wiki can bring them together in a topic page…and of course everyone wants to make a wikipedia, or use it as a simple CRM type tool.

What’s happening is that wikis are actually replacing a process, they are becoming a new way to do group work. Just the same forums, as Sameer mentions have been round a long time, and are useful for discussions that would normally be done in email…we can often use a forum to discuss a task.

Both these group tools are about the nitty gritty work tasks that we do in email, whereas blogs and networks may not be seen as task oriented, they are more about learning, sharing, opportunities…something nice to have…and of course require network effects…and the returns of effectiveness, efficiency, productivity may take longer to reveal…in this light they may be considered an R&D thing, not something for Joe Bloggs (pardon the pun).

In saying this, our community/team blogs are also taking off because they are in a group space, and the postings are about a task, status, progress, tips (we also see posts about sharing links, and theory). But, if we were to have blogs out of a context, that is, social network profile blogs, then I think adoption would take much longer, people would feel more like they have their own publishing house (feels more serious and onus to regularly post compared to a group space like a forum), and the postings would not necessarily be in the context of a task. People would be free to publish what they know from their own individual context. Managers may see this as not contributing their time to achieving a deliverable, the question would be asked, what returns are you getting from this that you can feedback into your job.

Social tools can be used multiple ways

This comes to a fundamental question. New social tools can be used to achieve tasks, but they can also be used to be more effective, connected, tuned in, so your tasks can be more optimal, of better quality, quickly executed, of reduced cost… So if you want your tasks to be more effective, rather if you want your workers to be more effective and deliver quality and innovation, then workers need time away from their tasks to devote to informal learning. Actually, it’s not even necessarily time away from tasks, rather we need time to tap into co-workers in researching, finding, conversing, and learning. Some of this may be seeking stuff from people, some of this may be general talking about what we know so we become smarter people.

Either way social tools are here to stay, we can use them for tasks, and if allowed time, we can use them to become more effective and tuned in, which in turn make us more efficient and deliver quality tasks.

If the company devotes the time, social tools can be used in two ways, if they don’t allow the time, they can still be used to achieve tasks (what you are already doing with email and attachments and rigid process systems)

Jordan Frank says in the comments of Sameer’s post, that when the tools are more process centric they don’t seem so standalone, they are more in the flow of doing work, eg. beta bloggers vs alpha bloggers, and Directed/Volunteered.

I mentioned in my post, Conversations that revolve around task objects, certain social tools will get more adoption and credibility (acceptance) when they contribute in the flow of getting work done (more process-centric). Then later on when they become indispensable, there will be more acceptance in dedicating time to using these tools to become a learning organisation, ie. connecting and sharing what we know, more above-the-flow. James Dellow is also on this meme of social features to existing tools, rather than just having a blog or wiki, we can have blog-like and wiki-like features on existing products.

Do we face a catch 22?

I say we need to first use these tools in group spaces like communities or teams of practice, as you don’t need network effects, and they are based around doing existing work…the returns and usefulness are seen quicker.

Once people see the benefit and find the group spaces indispensable (eg. this is already happening at my work), then management may see the value in people having their own individual spaces in a profile based network.
Further to this I think a microblog profile network (like Socialcast) may get more traction than a regular blog profile network, as more people ask questions and have conversation, than having a publishing bent…lot’s of bloggers are also on Twitter, but lots of people on Twitter do not blog.

Now this is all OK when you have existing groups that want to use an online social space to work in, but what about when you want to find people with like interests in order to build a group.

There are two things happening, one is existing groups can work better in their online social space, but we also want to capitalise on unknown scattered experts…who are our people? what are they good at? let’s self organise to find this out! We need to capitalise on what we don’t know, we need to seize opportunities from our pool of talent. In this case it seems we need a social network in order to find each other, and then come together in a group.

I guess this is why most new social platforms (like Clearspace) have the social network and the group component.

Collaboration vs Participation

Olivier Amprimo has a really good point here, in relation to what I’ve mentioned above, organisations see more immediate value in collaboration spaces rather than participation systems.

“Collaborative tools are made to have people work together on common tasks. It is about team work. They are principally organized around emails and documents, detailed profiling, structured workflows (document approval or task management).”

“Participative tools are made to have people socialize their ideas and activity. It is about Flow and Networked Individualism (as Lee says). They are principally organized around blogs, social networks, social bookmarks…”

He also relates this to adoption:

“The adoption of a collaborative tool focuses on deployment. It is mostly technical, the rest is the job of the boss who will enforce its use and agree training sessions.”

“The adoption of a participative tool focuses on great user interfaces, quality people and quality content in the early days in order to create exemplary behaviors and interactions that will influence new joiners. No matter Free Will, Humans are rational herds : they copy early-adopters behaviors and reproduce it or modify it only on the fringe. It is mostly sociological, no one can be bossy to make that work. That’s OD work.”

From this we can see that participative networks are more bottom-up and don’t revolve around a task or a thing, they are instead nodes that collide together. This is more about a learning organisation, it’s related to know-how and work, but not directly (a deliverable)…it could be seen as replacing some training with informal learning.

Olivier Amprimo has another post related to this topic. In it he brings up a point related more to communities of practice rather than team spaces. He mentions that learning communities require dedication and work on borrowed/allowed time (our communities of practice at work have sponsors, which means they agree that’s is OK for these people to spend time in the community).

“Most people see online communities as communities of practices, which are known to be hard to implement because they require engagement of of members and managers. Immediately people associate engagement as costly (time consumption from the financial angle) if not dangerous for the corporate reputation (B2C). Communities of practices also have the reputation of being not successful, because most of them have low activity.”

Olivier compares these group spaces to participation networks which may generate value without needing to build group engagement.

“…my stake is that we can take advantage of the “crowd” without demanding any engagement from any of its members.
This is what I call a socialized service. A socialized service is a service where the activity of an individual is made visible to others, so that it creates awareness among service users.
It relates to concepts such as “social translucence” and “ambient awareness”. The concept of “social translucence (of technology)” is almost ten years old now. It suggests that communication systems can be designed in such a way that they support social processes. Social translucence proposes that three factors support social processes in computer-mediated work environments. Those factors are: visibility, awareness and accountability. “Ambient awareness” is similar, it actually surfaced in a NY times paper later.”

Activities and numbers

Which brings me round to Betrand Duperrin’s post, like me he see’s that numbers are essential in networks, but not for collaboration. Which means some tools are taken up much easier over others. He also relates this to activities; those that are more certain, target oriented and focused tend not to need critical mass to achieve success.

I’d like to simply say this the other way around: those activities or systems that are set up to tease out weak signals, deal with uncertainty, surface opportunities, find and learn; don’t have a focused purpose, rather they are a framework to naturally manifest into something, based on the level (critical mass) and quality of participation.

We know the aim is all the things I mentioned directly above, but we don’t explicitly work towards that aim, rather we just participate and value emerges that achieves these aims. ie we have a framework to surface innovation, but we aren’t trying to specifically innovate, it will just happen by default…the system creates the conditions for participation, and from there everything else may eventuate…we don’t directly knowledge share, it’s just a by product of participating.

Bertrand says:

“In the beginning, my idea was that is was depending on the kind of tool. It’s easy to understand that a 5 people team is enough to demonstrate the value of a wiki and that a social network, on the other hand, needs a critical mass of users. With hindsight I’s rather say that it depends on activities.”

Personally, I think the numbers and the activity goes hand in hand. If you want to tap into enterprise-wide diverse ideas and opportunities (which is not a focused task to achieve, like collaborating on an end product), you simply need critical mass.

“…social networks, being more flexibility-oriented and aiming at mobilizing expertises inside adhoc groups, need to be used by a lot of people to make sure the relevant resources (people and information) will be there when they’ll be needed.”

“That’s why wikis is often mentioned as the example of a tool that was easily adopter : defined human and functional scopes, defined goal. A contrario, tools which have a larger spectrum, more protean uses, such as blogs or social networks, need a deeper work to be a part of people’s day to day job.”

And this brilliant way of putting it:

Again, some great insight:

I can’t help these excerpts, I’ve nearly re-published Bertrand’s post here:

Size is not critical when a clear need exists about what people have to deliver so that people immediately understand what benefits they will get from using such or such tools. Here, the goal, what has to be delivered, who has to participate are known from the beginning. Use is led by work organization“.

I really like that Bertrand has included this middle space below eg. a team using a wiki to list workarounds, and using a blog for tips and tricks

“Size may be critical when social software is to overcome dysfunctions in the way the work is organized. Here the goal is defined, but the people who have to participate and the functional spectrum can’t be anticipated, nor when the software will be used. Use is led by circumstances“.

“Size is critical when social software is expected to help people to deliver their full potential. Which, said in other words, mean to allow their to use all their skills to make things the company may have never thought about. It’s typically the case in “innovation” projects, where it’s impossible to know who wll have ideas, who’ll be interested in joining the discussion to improve things….and what the idea will be used for. Use is lead by the will to participate“.

Not long ago I posted on how broad communities can be a fertile ground to sprout new communities, and I also posted about a crowdsourcing exercise to create a community/s.

SIDENOTE - after this crowdsourcing exercise the next step it to organise the ideas into categories. Each category will be a new forum, our job is to move ideas into the correct forum. It’s great we are coming up with these forums after the fact rather than the prescriptive approach, but there sure is a lot of organising to do after an “idea’s” month containing 400 ideas and their replies. If only our forum had tagging. One forum stream with tags is the way to go.
We will be looking at who can lead each forum, by possibly looking at who posted about each category the most, and if they are passionate. From then on our idea jam will turn into a perpetual idea’s community, not quite the sophistication of Spigit, but at least we have momentum.

Anyway the other day I got a request for a real classic CoP, in that it is about a subject matter many cross-functional people have experience in, but we don’t have a practice or business unit.

A push for it was when the company assembled a team for a project but failed to have the most optimal people in that project, as we didn’t know they existed, and most would not be aware of the talent of these people as their job title does not give it away.

The idea is to link all these people into a common place, so this does not happen again, and so a subject matter space of conversations and documents can be built.

This was not a mandate by management, instead a guy passionate about the subject requested a grass roots way using a CoP to get this off the ground.

I can’t wait to see this CoP a year from now. A senior manager may come across it and think, wow, I didn’t know we knew so much about this topic. This looks like a real viable venture, perhaps we should graduate this to an official business unit ie. a core service offering.

When we look at it like this, online tools like CoPs are very empowering, and can do something for you and the groups career, as well as feed your passion, and be able to help the company be more effective and locate talent.

What was available before our online CoPs…email and the intranet.

Who’s going to know about an email list, it’s not really a place you stumble across, and it’s not an organised portal.

Obviously this group cannot have an intranet page, as they are not official, and if they did they cannot use the intranet page on a daily basis (an intranet page is not a conversation space).

The fact that we now have online social tools that allow bottom-up grass roots effort to emerge is very enabling. These guys can now create a space and say look at us, come join us. If you create conditions by giving people the tools, the talent will surface, people will do the main aims of KM without you asking them.

Without our online communities:

- the findability of these experts would be ad-hoc or non-existent
- the company would not being leveraging the talent pool
- these guys would be frustrated that they can’t engage, consolidate, and be known so they can work in this role in good projects
- we may miss opportunity to create a possible new venture

…all because the common knowledgeworker doesn’t have the power tools, and are not given the time to create portals that may prove popular, and even the next business success.

I think it’s important to listen to knowledge workers and give them tools, as they deal with the business at ground zero daily, and may have an idea to revolutionise what can be done.

It’s a win-win really.

A middle manager may say they don’t want their people wasting time on other things, but allowing this may just help the business be more progressive and adaptive. I think senior managers and middle managers need to be on par that it’s OK for people to spend some time on stuff that is non team related or better still even complementary to team work.

“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things”- Peter Drucker

Last month I posted about some high-level questions about introducing Community of Practice (CoPs) to a team, see Team-based communities are about change, commitment and tasks. The crux of that post is that communities need work, leaders need to understand it’s about creating conditions for behaviours to adapt to a new way. Even if everyone loves the benefits, it doesn’t mean it will be used, it requires dedicated facilitating till people get used to using a community like it’s second nature…habits take time to be re-channeled, and this will be reinforced with guidance…and hopefully design is on your side by lowering the barrier to entry.

So when you are creating a CoP for your team, you are doing more than creating a website to share know-how, you are actually starting a new routine and behaviours…this is more psychology/sociology/cognitive sciences rather than technology.

In a later post, Online communities : Bottom-up requests, I delved into some golden start-up rules that people need to be aware of right from the word go, to prevent starting off on the wrong foot.

Following on from that, in this post I’ll share some more points about things to consider when creating a CoP.

WORKSHOP NEEDS AND WANTS

Prior to requesting a community, it’s a good idea to do a workshop with your team or group of people to understand their needs, wants and how they work. I mentioned some of the needs analysis questions in this post, and also a visual way.

Bottom-up

If a potential community/s has value it will emerge from these bottom-up discussions.
This is in contrast to a top-down approach where a structure and community is created for a set of people in advance. This method is unnatural as it attempts to force a community into existence.

Ownership and Relevancy

The community members are more likely to participate if they feel strong about the topic, and have some sense of ownership of the community.
In regards to team-based communities (as opposed to shared interest groups), what happens quite often is that, for bigger teams, the community is too general, and not all members identify with it, or feel a sense of ownership.
They may also feel that when they visit the homepage it’s not 100% relevant to them.
A way to test this is whether all members identify with the community name, if it is too broad or vague, then people won’t feel a sense of place. The more specific a place is the more people can identify with it.
A good solution is to have multiple communities for each sub-team, this way each sub-team feels like they really own the community, and they are in a space with their closest colleagues.
A general and more simple community can be created for cross communications.

NOTE: all this is ideal, so long as we have leaders to lead each community

Confidence and Trust

People participate more frequently when they are in an environment they feel comfortable in, and this is more likely to happen amongst a smaller number of people you trust.

Interaction will be done in public rather than private email, and this fact makes a big difference in someone’s confidence, as they no longer control the audience, and the content is there to stay.

Passionate Leader/Facilitator and Role-Model

What is most essential is that a passionate and dedicated person is willing to run each community. And with team-based communities, this usually means the leads. For if the lead isn’t a role-model in active participation, then this sends a signal that the community is not important.
If the team-lead chooses a worker to lead the community, they sometimes find it hard to influence members to participate, as unlike cross-functional interest group type communities, members in some team communities may have had no choice in being members, and may only respond to higher authority.

RUNNING A PILOT

It’s paramount that community Facilitators and it’s key members pilot a new community before opening it up to more potential members.

Proficiency

The reason for this is that the Facilitator will need to be equipped to answer lots of beginner questions, the more proficient and experienced they are, the more they can guide members in the right direction.

Structure

A pilot run gives the key members a chance to use the community and get a feel if the structure is fluid enough, moving it around to accommodate the way it’s practically used. E.g. it may be decided that a particular forum is too general and it’s needs to be splintered into new forums.

Populate Content

Another aspect is that a blank community is not very forthcoming and exciting. New members want to see examples of the type of content added and where it’s added, so they can learn where things fit, and what type of content will now be handled by the community over other formats such as email. The more content there is to start with, and the more regular it’s added, the more you create a “stickiness” value, where you get people frequently visiting and contributing to be informed and socially interact.

Guides

A community specific help guide, and instruction are essential points of reference that the Facilitator may want to create, so members know how to use the community correctly.

In the next post I’ll point out some adoption factors.

Our Communities of Practice at work are currently in the development stage. As we learn the software and develop guides we are also piloting lots of various communities to learn about structure, and human dynamics. There has been no effort to generate interest…it’s all word of mouth across our many global offices…I suppose all this stuff is in vogue at the moment.

When we are ready to officially release an email will go out to nearly 8,000 people, but before that time comes we want to be ready.
To tell you the truth I can’t wait till that time, as we can move on to the next phase of “community consulting”, that is, supporting and facilitating leaders of each community.
In fact I think we have piloted too many communities that we can support and guide, as we are too busy developing, so it’s important we jump on this soon before the water gets cold for some people.

Strategy

I think the deployment of our CoPs is a mix of a KM demand and supply strategy. At a macro level it’s about sharing knowledge in general, getting around hierarchies by allowing people to form cross-functional groups. I see *some* of the CoPs we already have as a breeding ground or testing area for the worthiness of future business units.
Actually CoPs are a perfect example of an enterprise 2.0 attitude of failure for free type experimenting. They can be used as a feasibility sandpit on whether the company should get into a new a area of business. This can be done by senior managers to get a pulse on the issue from the knowledgeworkers; or a CoP can be created by knowledgeworkers as a way to demonstrate the feasibility and worthiness of their proposal for a new area of business.
The CoP can attract relevant people together, and the exchange from all levels of people can help with the decision. This can be done from a crowdsourcing angle, a project team, or just a regular bottom-up CoP that may attract and generate interest.

Anyway, the KM Demand strategy is more at the micro-level. When we consult with a team who create a new CoP we help them with their needs analysis, and make sure they read some literature we provide about CoP concepts and facilitating.

NOTE: Supply-based KM (predictability KM) can also relate to capture, codify, and information into a structured database; over the demand-style KM (adaptable/sense-making KM) which is more about creation than shelving, where efforts are more involved in creating conditions for people to share amongst each other, and successful transfer of know-how.

This is the plan of the next phase:

Homepage

- an image of a public space (a commons) where you hover over icons and learn about communities and their features eg. people gathered around a table is a forum, a guy on a soap box is a blogger, etc…
- some icons have links to different places for information (as listed in the sections following below)
- we thought a homepage is important for people to visit to understand and orient themselves
- we will link to this homepage from the Intranet, and via the directory page (see below)
- it will also have a blog that is re-syndicated from the Information Desk Community (see below)

Flyer

- a one pager glossy PDF on communities, benefits and features
- the idea is an overview of the homepage in more of a takeway style, and selling the benefits
- I guess in between a product information sheet and a promotion flyer
- A link to this PDF will be on the homepage

Information Desk community

- A link to this is via the homepage and via the directory page (see below)
- A one stop shop with a communications blog, communal tips blog, and various forums.
- This is where we will also store our help guides (in PDF and a wiki soon), FAQ, and a issues and suggestions wiki
- I’m hoping people can help out each other…I’m going to experiment by not answering questions right away, in order to see if others will
- I also want to showcase some icons of featured bloggers and communities, I may even blog about some great blog posts and hot forum discussions

Facilitators Community

- A link to this is via the homepage and via the directory page (see below)
- This is a more advanced community to learn, guide and share experiences on facilitating and leading communities (the obvious members are people who facilitate/lead their own communities)
- A lot of this will be about cultivating, adoption, participation, gardening, sustaining, promotion, etc…
- I really hope to see members conversing, and helping out each other…I’m sure I’m gonna learn a lot as well
- We have various forums, a communications blog, and communal tips blogs, and people can create their own blogs

Directory

- A directory of all our communities (browse or search)
- Unfortunately we don’t have an aggregator of latest content from all communities (a kind of pulse of the organisation)

Presentations

- We have the Facilitators community for perpetual guidance, but I also plan to prepare a bunch of presentation as a kind of Facilitators boot camp.
- Facilitating isn’t just about helping people to use the tools, it’s also about interpersonal skills, re-purposing current email habits, and work routines
- Really it’s about change, but from the inside-out (rather than telling people the big picture of change, it’s about focusing on the self benefit of re-purposing current methods in different ways)
- Maybe I’ll also do some Lunch and Learn sessions with general users, kind of like an outreach version of content in our Information Desk

Pre-Consulting

- Besides supporting and monitoring global communities, I will also continue with the help of a support team to create communities
- Pre-creation process people fill out a request guide (here we ask questions like: who will your members be, what will your first 5 blogs posts be, what types of blogs and forums will you have, what topics will you talk about, is the community about shared learning, or to help a team coordinate and communicate, Who will be leading, and running the community…)
- During this creation process is consultation on the dynamics and food for thought for each individual community
- At this stage I also give the potential community leader a conceptual guide on what it really means to lead a community
- Once I create the community, I give the community leader a Facilitators Reference guide to the next steps to take, with excerpts from various help guides (my idea is to educate them as much as possible, and to make known that communities are not tools, they are about activity and interaction between people.)
- My quote is “Communities are conversations”

Post-Consulting

- This is what I’m looking forward to the most (the more anthropology/ethnography side of it)
- I will be monitoring each community and consulting
- As I mentioned earlier it’s important I follow-up on communities and guide them through their growth stage
- Things we may find here are the leader is not really being a role-model by participating, the community is too big where someone people want to splinter off into a new community, it needs more regular activity to keep it fresh, polls, competitions/theme weeks, are members being heard and do they have enough permissions to do things, champions may need to blog storm (hand holding) by sitting with members and help them create blog posts till they get the hang of it, etc…
- my recent discovery of spidergrams will be the tool of choice for community orientation, health checks and aspirations

Support

- I’m going to need to train IT and a few key support champions via some presentations
- They can also learn via the Information desk and Facilitator community

This started as a second job at work, but it’s getting so viral that soon I will be full-time (hopefully), as the workload is getting too much…which is a positive sign for CoPs as a demanded tool for social productivity.

At the moment we have me (half a person), and a techie (on demand), which is not going to be a viable support model. Part of successful release and adoption is “support”; at the moment it’s like I’m famous and don’t have time for everyone, people are not getting help quick enough, this leads to a bad experience which is not due to the product, but due to lack of support.
Any metrics we are gonna take later on has got to include that adoption may be lower than it ought to be, therefore overall participation may be lower than it has to be, due to low support.

Conclusion

My message to others out there is if you want to do this right or take it seriously, you need a dedicated team of at least a couple of people.
I will stress it’s not about IT offering the software and that’s it…communities will fail…whereas social networks may be a different matter (I’m not sure yet).

It must be a line of business, where a dedicated person supports the software, but equally important is someone to help facilitate communities get off the ground correctly and be successful. We need to take time to help people use the technology to augment the needs of their unique situation. A lot of this is about group dynamics, rather than technology.

Our project about deploying CoPs is not done once they are deployed, it’s not *just* about getting them operating in a risk free, secure and homogeneous way, and then walking away.
Instead, from a KM perspective our project is about helping people use technology to do work, helping them be socially productive, helping them connect to people with like interests, helping them surf their worklife complexities, augmenting their ability to do tasks, helping them be aware and learn…

People are unique, situations and contexts are unique, so our consultation is unique. We are not the factory line here, it’s not a one size fits all context. Communities are enabling and are more about effectiveness than efficiency.

Nancy White has been generous to share a section out of a chapter of her co-authored (Etienne Wenger and John. D Smith) forth coming book, Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities.

Here’s what Nancy says about community orientation:

“In our research of CoPs we noticed 9 general patterns of activities that characterized a community’s orientation. Most had a mix, but some were more prominent in every case. By looking at orientations, we posit, you are in a better position to understand how to support them with tools and processes. They give you a lens to reflect on how your community is doing and where you might want it to be headed.“

Nancy’s chart is on “orientation”, assessing exactly what type of community you are by examining your activities and components, and how they are weighted on their own and in comparison to the rest…and specifically in this context, how they can be supported or enabled by technology. As a result of this reflection you may discuss, plan and re-focus…or perhaps things are exactly where you want to be.

eg. It may illustrate that your community is more of an asynchronous bunch of people as you don’t have real-time meetings. This is a good or bad thing depending if it aligns with your intentions and aims.
It may illustrate that members don’t participate in their individual space. This may be OK if all members are happy with a forum, but if not, then perhaps profile blogs can remedy this.

Community Orientations

• Meetings
  • real-time gathering (f2f, telecon, videocon)
• Projects
  • coordinate an activity/task
• Access to expertise
  • learn from topic experts
• Relationship
  • get to know each other, build rapport
  • this point reminds me of an Anecdote white paper where they mention hanging out with each other often enough has an unconscious absorbing effect of knowledge transfer and learning
• Context
  • is the community audience the members (inward community), or awareness for visitors or both
• Community cultivation
  • facilitating member needs and the whole togetherness and bonding of the community members. The stronger this is, the more people are comfortable and aware of where they fit and how to interact…I think this drives more conversations.
• Individual participation
  • members freedom to roam around the community and access information, and express their point of view, creating a more diverse CoP
• Content
  • this may be the reification part of a generated output based on community interactions eg. a journal article, a toolkit
• Open ended conversation
  • space and opportunity for conversation (without this you would just have an online website, not a community)

In Nancy’s words it’s a planning, assessment and reflection method; and best of all it’s visual…the spidergram/radarchart gives you a view that a linear list could just not do.

See it in the slidedeck below (PDF):

Nancy point’s to a post by Shawn Callahan, on how he uses the spidergram for a present and future assessment and aspiration tool. Included is a podcast with Shawn and Nancy.

What I like about this is you could use the spidergram to list the current orientation of the group, and then overlay the same spidergram of where they hope to be with the enablement of an online community tool. And in the future do another spidergram snapshot to see how far they have progressed.

Adoption health check

I was thinking a spidergram could be used for an adoption diagnostic or health check for communities in the growth stage.

Assessing the scope:

• Is your community still serving the needs of participants?
• Is the shared identity still strong?
• How can the direction or focus be altered in a holistic way to better sustain the community?
• How and with what aids/activities/tools can this new outlook be supported?

CONTENT

• Is the community 90% relevant to members?
• Are there some active topics that could warrant their own community?
• Are there thriving conversations?

DESIGN

• Are topics buried, or easily accessible on the homepage?
• Is the community homepage informative enough and designed for intuitive usability?
• Do you know how to publish content and interact?

FACILITATE

• Is the facilitator a role-model in contributing, interacting and gardening?
• Is the facilitator doing hand-holding (how to publish, re-purposing email)?
• Is the community being promoted, are you doing group building exercises?

PEOPLE

• Do members have the confidence/trust and comfort to participate?
• Is email being re-purposed as blog, forum and wiki content?
• Are people emerging as subject matter experts?

CLICK HERE FOR BIGGER IMAGE

DIAGNOSIS

This community could be a little more relevant; this may be because there has been a tangent on a related topic which is getting lots of attention and perhaps overshadowing the shared identity. An idea may be to splinter this topic into it’s own community.

It seems we may need to fix the design to perhaps bring some topic coverage on the homepage (that may be currently buried), which may drive some more participation and conversation.

If we also do some handholding (eg. one on one tutoring in posting to a blog), we may increase people’s confidence, and double our people with know-how in how to publish, as a result we may get even more thriving conversations.

I’ve also got a feeling we already have some good conversations due to the Facilitator being a good role model as an active contributor (people seem to be following their lead and enthusiasm), and that they are also making sure emails are re-purposed as a blog communication, forum discussion or wiki collaboration.

The fact that some people are becoming known as subject matter experts is a real positive thing, and illustrates that the community is being adopted and recognised. I think a little more group building exercise, or real-time connection will get people closer together and perhaps have more to talk about online and feel more confident as they know their fellow members a little more.

Community requests

A while back I posted on some golden rules people need to think about when they request and form a community. I also included some other start-up aspects and displayed them in a spidergram, since I am addicted to these things.

NOTE: To tell you the truth a spidergram is not a typical use for this example as I think a spidergram works best when you can see weighted focus on similar level components. eg what was the overall performance of a project based on areas such as quality, delivery, engagement, time, cost. etc…Nonetheless it still gives you a snapshot, in a more imprinting and relatable way than a linear list

But since I’m addicted here it is…

1. Do you have a substantial enough topic that warrants it’s own community?
2. Do you have a community leader with passion and time?
3. Do you have passionate key members?
4. Do you have a shared identity on what you want out of the community? eg. topic, learning
5. Have you workshopped your design, topics, tools, etc…
6. Is it about learning and sharing?
7. Is it about coordinating tasks?
8. Is it about communicating to a general visitor audience? More a communication, and crowdsource tool, than a community?

CLICK HERE FOR BIGGER IMAGE

DIAGNOSIS

From this example you can see that this community have a robust topic, where the aim is more about learning and sharing, and have members ready to go, but a passionate person (with some time on their hands) is yet to step forward or be nominated as the Community Leader.

At this stage they don’t intend to use it to coordinate tasks, and it’s not the type of community that is one way communications with blog comments for feedback and perhaps a forum idea box for crowdsourcing.

They still need to work out their shared identity (what everyone wants out of it, what’s it’s mainly aiming to achieve), and this is probably due to the fact that they need to come together and workshop their needs.

More

Here are some other spidergrams/radarcharts I have come across lately:

Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?
Can Enterprise 2.0 help companies innovate
Taxonomies > Sensemaking > Adoption

Here are some tools from a quick search on Google…they use Excel…dang, and I went and used powerpoint:

Using a Radar chart in Excel to see the big picture
Custom Radar Chart
Present your data in a radar chart
radar chart/spider chart