The Community Is the Platform - Part 2


In the last post, I talked about the importance of focusing on communities as the context for collaboration and knowledge sharing. How do you accelerate community building in your organization? Here are some ideas:
  1. Community Portal - Create a convenient, helpful central page of information that helps others discover, explore and engage your community. Include elements like:
    • Identification Info - meaningful description of community context and purpose, links to core community artifacts.
    • Communications - engaging news about community activity and contributions.
    • People - highlight who is involved in your community.
    • Exploration Tools - intuitive links, search and other navigation to help visitors find valuable content.
    • Self Help and Interaction - FAQs, Q&A, and discussion forums to help the community find answers and kickstart collaborative contribution.
    • Orientation - online training and help to remove barriers for new visitors, paving their transition to community contributors.
  2. Knowledge Base - create a highly accessible, interconnected repository of knowledge. It needs to accommodate both formal and emerging information. Leverage collaborative technologies to speed up the collection of emerging content.
  3. Social Info - make human expertise and social relationships highly visible. Emphasize social information on all community artifacts and communications.
  4. Facilitation - ensure success through upfront investment in knowledge professionals to:
    • Creatively help others "bump into" your community through deploying a wide variety of promotional techniques, particularly directed at unfamiliar audiences.
    • Maximize the impact of the community portal.
    • Design and automate metrics to gauge community health.
    • Actively remove barriers to collaboration.
    • Stimulate the knowledge lifecycle by helping others transform implicit knowledge through the steps of communications capture, artifact incubation, and collaborative content improvement, creating a continuous stream of reusable and valuable explicit knowledge.
What Are You Waiting For?

The good news is that many organizations already have tools and infrastructure that support the above suggestions. Where there are gaps, excellent open source and low cost solutions are available. By matching these technical capabilities with effective community development skill sets, a new level of collaboration and knowledge sharing is just around the corner.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Knowledge Factory

Image
SECI Model at Fuji Xerox - from the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology A Model for Learning When researching knowledge management and organizational learning you're bound to come across the SECI model and the work of the Nonaka and Takeuchi. Appreciating the value of tacit knowledge (carried in people's minds) and explicit knowledge (codified or articulated) is paramount for the knowledge based industries. The authors of the SECI model emphasize that as valuable as the knowledge assets may be, the process of creating knowledge and how it is transformed is where the real potential lies. Simply managing existing knowledge is not enough . The Heart of the Machine Intuitively we know that human talent is the critical success factor in hi-tech and other knowledge based contexts. Creativity and innovation are primarily human functions and are hard to systematize but are essential for ongoing success. Additionally, the picture below demonstrates how all significa
Read more

The 90-9-1 Rule

Image
What does successful collaboration look like? Understanding how communities and people interact online is essential for setting the right expectations. Often people misinterpret metrics or focus their energy in the wrong direction because they do not have a reasonable benchmark to assess how well their on-line communities are functioning. All Things Are Not Equal In any team or community you can expect to find a variety of expertise and strengths. We usually don't expect everyone to do the exact same thing, or to have the same skill sets and strengths. In fact, the complementary nature of individual strengths is essential to creating strong teams and vibrant communities. Knowing this, it is surprising that the default expectation for online interaction is identical contribution, with performance metrics that reinforce this unhealthy view. Not only is this unrealistic, it's a sure recipe for failure! Setting Expectations Most everyone is familiar with the Pareto principle
Read more

Requirements - a False Sense of Security

Image
The Challenge In an industry with over 35 years of software engineering experience, it's amazing that we have failed to produce any significant breakthrough that improves the ability of executing successful software projects . The brightest minds have been humbled battling the tide of anarchy that persistently undermines the progress of their complex initiatives. "Discipline and control", the gurus cry, will help curb our irresponsible creative surges. Envying their manufacturing counterparts, knowledge workers have reached out to embrace disciplines that have reduced the insanity while simultaneously eroding innovation and creativity beneath the weight of bureaucratic process and fragmented work distribution. In this protected environment, the "sigh of relief" eventually evaporates into a new level of panic, as emerging competitors run roughshod across existing markets with disruptive innovations. Successful assembly and delivery of complex artifacts is ulti
Read more