KM Roundups: Communities & Collaboration
• Dave Snowden on why it’s not a great idea for organisations to try and ‘roll out’ communities of practice. I find this particularly interesting because I think successful communities each have a distinct character, depending on their members and purpose, and by trying to organise them to fit into a corporate model, you run the risk of squashing the life out of them. On the other hand, if you are trying to seed communities in an organisation, you have to start somewhere. I think Dave is right when he says “you need to create an environment in which people can play with multiple tools, moving some of the results to a formal environment, when and if needed.” However, he also says that “With the growth of social computing and familiarity with those tools this [is] easy to achieve” which may be true if you have a user community that’s familiar with those tools – but I’m not sure if it holds true of more traditional user communities who are less assured about using social computing tools.
• Great post from Kevin Anderson, rounding up Meg Pickard’s comments on the difference between a community and an audience. He then goes on to talk about the difficulties of moderation, and dealing with trolls. Although this is talking about ‘open access’ communities rather than ‘behind the firewall’ communities, I think it perfectly highlights one of the major fears that people – particularly in corporate organisations – have about experimenting with social computing; what if it ‘spirals out of control’?
