I remember reading somewhere about the owners of Buffy the Vampire Slayer wanting to create an official online community, but it was best to let the existing fan community do it’s thing even if the new space was offering lots more features…people were comfortable where they were, and they each owned it.

We have a newer CoP at work on engineering design tools. We already had a few different topic based CoPs covering different tools. The new design CoP wanted to poach those forums so everything about design tools was to happen in the one space.
Not gonna happen, people are comfortable where they are, they don’t want to shift context to another CoP to speak in that forum…plus they trust the people in their current forum.
I think if we were to merge them we would lose the discussion. Great all in one place, but a dead place at that…sort of thing.
Classic example of control for neatness, whereas messiness is natural, so these patterns must be monitored and harnessed as Brian is doing…we have the mighty hyperlink to cross-link stuff which saves the day.

Social computing is messy…just like real life most of the time I can talk about what I want where I want…I don’t have to think hang on what I’m saying is about topicX, I better walk over there and say it.
This I guess is the ease of networks over group spaces, in that you don’t need to shift context…rather than a group space, it’s just a conversation space (there’s no official agenda, people emerge into the conversation, then dissipate…kind of like a random email conversation).

Nancy I find this blurring between group and network at blogs.
I spend lots of time on Bas Reus’s blog on complexity…a few familiar faces hang out there…sometimes you see new people, sometimes you don’t hear from others. This is not defined, it just happened, we are not a group, we just sometimes hang out at his blog if there is some juicy stuff. What’s awesome about it is that I always meet new people in the comments with amazing blogs of their own.
I also find random Twitter hashtags the same kind og blurryness…but some of these take a step further and make them a little more visible eg. Kmers.org

Some related posts (caution they are gigantic)
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2009/02/17/how-relevant-are-communities-of-practice-in-a-network-age/
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2009/05/22/do-group-tools-get-more-traction-due-to-not-requiring-network-effects-and-being-in-the-context-of-certainty/

Nancy’s points about the delusion of control and the tensions of what ought to be the designated platform (vs the accidental/incidental platform) are interesting. In a Gov2.0 sense, if the intent is to elicit perspectives that can then further inform service planning and design, then the platform where the dialogue is occurring becomes highly relevant.

A closed/hosted platform is a much easier thing to be performing Analytics on to get a sense of emergent internet memes (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_meme) that we need to understand to inform Service Design (knowable unknowns) in response to an expressed population need. The challenge of content discovery- to identify and respond to those memes- becomes that extra bit harder when the dialogue is occurring on those non-designated platforms. It’s like trying to listen in on a conversation that’s occurring outside a room, where you may or may not be invited. A wicked problem. As you’ve rightly identified though, conversations happen where people naturally cluster. In real-space, or a digital equivalent.

Just because we create the container for a digital discussion, doesn’t mean the conversation will happen there. The conversation remains the key consideration though – it is in this exchange of ideas that we can connect with people and allow emergence of perspectives around which policy responses can be shaped.

First of all, thanks for the pointer to the Line and it’s shadow components. You offer a great example of the blurring between community and network, the inward facing (or attempts at control, boundaries) and the outward facing (where control is more accurately perceived as a delusion!).

I am running into this tension over and over again between the “designated platform” and what people choose to use/do in the wider network. To me, it is a sign of success. Most often for the people I’m working with, it is a very scary thing. Well, it is probably both, eh?

But this shift from defined boundaries to connections to broader networks, I think this is here to stay and it asks us to redefine for ourselves what we do, seek, and steward in our communities.

Thanks for the great example. What strikes me about your story is how you are holding the authenticity of the conversation as your most important reference point, suspending the assumption that “my platform is what defines and legitimizes the conversation.” When we have a job that’s tied to a platform, it’s all too easy to see it as more important and legitimizing than it could possibly be.

So what’s to prevent you from linking directly to the wilder wild west? What would a link or a comment such as you’ve posted here do to that conversation?

The Line – Week 2 http://shar.es/mDHWi got me thinking, posting at [link to post] as part of Community Of Practice chat abt Projects

– Posted using Chat Catcher

Thank you for letting our class take a “field trip” to your blog. I found the relationship between projects and communities quite interesting. I have been a part of both, but never connected with the way in which each group affects the other. I find that a project group and community usually work together or one group leads the other and either succeeds or fails.

An example that comes to my mind is a car. There are enthusiast groups, “communities”, out there that try to influence a company whose project is to develop or redesign a car. They enjoy discussing the highlights and changes that are being proposed. I watched a documentary about the Corvette not too long ago. During the last Corvette project when General Motors re-designed the car, the “community” was out in full force. Certain aspects of the project were being dictated by the company, such as removing the flip up lights. The community groups were outraged as these were seen as key characteristics of a Corvette. Blogs and other electronic media was allowing the “community” to be quite outspoken about changes that General Motors were making. Other challenges also existed, but General Motors changed the design to meet the needs of the “community” as best they could. General Motors certainly wanted their customers to like the new Corvette. It was interesting watching the back and forth conversation that the community put on the Corvette project team. Ultimately, the community won by ensuring some features were kept even at the expense of the project’s better judgment. If General Motors did not respond to the “community” it probably would have resulted in lost sales due to unhappy customers.

Ben
MSPM CityU

First, I have to chime in about something in Johns wonderful post. He wrote “Nancy White kept repeating “Technology is used collectively but experienced individually,” (or something to that effect) till Etienne and I could say it on cue.” I clearly have more work to do. The line is “technology is designed for the group and experienced by the individual.” This has caused more grief in our lives than we can imagine as we create IN OUR OWN MINDS what the experience is. We often don’t take the time to sense, make meaning and discover what others are experiencing. So in some virtual teams, this is a critical issue.

Second, I’m LOVING reading this thread. I used to be a facilitator for Boeing’s online First line manager training and reading comments from Boeing folk, it appears that tech use has come a long way in the past 3-4 years. Yay!

Third, I think John really nailed the tech stewardship items, so I thought I’d build on John Tropea’s comment and think about “followership” as an adjunct to his “communityship.” You might also be interested in this blog post on “social teams.” http://completeinnovator.com/2010/02/09/defining-the-%E2%80%9Csocial-team%E2%80%9D

Finally, in my practice, the really interesting places are the spaces between individuals, teams, communities and networks. Our ability to belong in all these spaces, ALL at the same time, across multiple technologies, is both complex, at time bewildering and pregnant with possibility. When our teams have stronger tendrils to communities and networks, I suspect they will be stronger. We may be able to keep retirees in the loop, telling stories, and probably being challenged!

The big question for me is “what do we stop doing to make time for these new forms of connection with others, both to achieve tasks, and to continue our learning?”

“Even if leadership is designed to encourage and to bring along other people and engage other people, it is still the individual driving it. So, show me a leader and I will show you all kinds of followers and that is not the kind of organizations that we want. That is not the way that we build things up.

I think that we need to put more emphasis on what I prefer to call, there is no word for it but I use the word ‘community-ship’, which is the idea that corporations and other organizations, when they function well, are communities.

People care for each other, they worry about each other, they work for each other and they work for the institution and they feel pride in the institution. You get that in young organizations such as Google or others like this because they are growing, they are energetic, but in the older organizations we destroy it.

All of the down-sizing has destroyed community-ship; it has destroyed a sense of belonging because nobody knows when they will get fired next. A lot of those firings were not because the companies had their backs to the wall, they were because they were not making quite as much profit as they were before.

So, people are managing the bottom line as if it is the top line; they deem how much profit they are supposed to make and then they run around firing people to make it. Of course it has a dreadful affect on the company though.

For one thing, the people who are leaving are the ones who carry the culture, they are the carriers of the culture and they carry a lot of the information of the organization. They have been trained for years and they have experience. All of a sudden they are out of the door and all of that is lost. So, you have destroyed the whole sense of community.”