John Smith introduced me to the idea of making notes using an instant messenger while on a conference call. Here Clay Shirky takes it one step further while recounting Joi Ito’s desire to get involved in a group conversation. Some very practical ideas for handling teleconferences.

Heiko Rudolf put me on to Clay Shirky’s writing today and I was perusing some of his essays. I was struck by this quote from an essay called A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.

I know I’ve mentioned this before, so at the risk of boring people with repetition I will just say that getting ActKM going required us to manufacture conversation (we had a roster of posters) so it looked like something interesting was happening. It was only when we attracted about 100 members that the conversation was self sustaining. We then had a group people wanted to join.

Nancy White pointed me to this excellent post by Kathy Sierra which describes how the online community, javaranch, was built on the principle of members “being nice” to one another. That probably sounds a touch idealistic but highlights the issue of whether norms should simply arise or be nurtured in a direction? My experience suggests you need to be explicit when the community is large and diverse.

What was really interesting about the post was the explicit use of a metaphor—the community as a dinner party where participants were guests—to affect member behaviour. Kathy makes it clear that the community was never a public place, rather at javaranch you were an invited guest. As a result people respected one another, great conversations ensued and people wanted to spend time there—to the tune of 500,000 unique visitors per month.

What other metaphors could we use to support community development (online of f2f)?

• the basketball game
• the street protest
• progressive dinner
• the restaurant
• the football match
• the gentlemen’s club (sadly I’m unable to think of a female equivalent)
• the sports club

This could go on forever. But what would be useful?

A great description of complex systems is emerging on wikipedia.

I was just re-reading some papers from IBM’s Institute for Knowledge-Based Organizations (now called Institute for Business Value). I’m writing a report describing an approach to establishing a community of practice for project managers and thinking about how much of their budget should be spent on the important costs categories. The paper by Fontain and Millen (reference below) provides four useful cost categories: roles (most salaries), activities (most meeting costs such as travel), technology, and content. There research is based on examining 24 comunities of practice and there were able to get 12 of the CoP leaders together and asked them, “how would you allocate your budget when starting a new CoP?” This is what they said:

“On average, the teams allocated 52% of the community budget to pay for salaries (and incentives) for community workers. On average, 32% was used to pay for meeting expenses, 10% for technology and 6% for publishing and promotion expenses." (p. 5)

This accords with my own experience and what I’ve heard from other CoP leaders.

What are your experiences in this area? I’ve noticed it is not something we see discussed in papers very often yet is essential information when planning a new CoP initiative.

Nancy White points us to a short report developed and written by seven CPSquare community members. The topic is one that has interested me for a while—lurkers. Why has such a negative term like ‘lurker’ emerged as the way we describe legitimate peripheral participation (to use Etienne Wenger’s phrase)? Susan Huckson, from the National Institute of Clinical Studies, calls lurkers, travellers, which is a far more +ve view of this important community member type. 

But this post is not about lurkers. This report is a great example of one of the ways to create new and stronger social networks in your community: identify an issue the community is interested in and find some members who want to work on it for a few weeks. Then provide the output back to the community.

Dave Snowden used to say that we can only know 150 people at any particular time or for any single network (read identity). This has been a useful rule of thumb for me in designing communities of practice but I wondered where the idea came from. I found this reference today from apophenia.

R. I. M. Dunbar, "Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates," Journal of Human Evolution, vol. 20, pp. 469-493, 1992.

apophenia makes the following observation:

Are there other references that make a similar observation about 150 people in a single network?

A couple of days ago Steve Jobs made the commencement address to students at Stanford. He tells three simple stories about himself with great effect. Jobs understands the power of narrative.

In case you haven’t already found Etienne Wenger’s publication page, here is the link. In particular I would recommend the report to the CIO Council of the US Federal Government entitled Communities of practice in government: the case for sponsorship. This report is written by William Snyder and Etienne and develops the argument for why governments should adopt a community of practice approach.

I heard this story from the New Yorker was circulated among senior Defence staff in Canberra and it unnerved them. I think it’s a fantastic story of how people with a need will share what they know and the role of management is to harness it—or even better, cultivate it.

I was pleasantly surprised last week to be asked by the editor of LeaderValues to submit my paper on communities of practice to their online journal. Some of my favourite business writers are represented such as Duncan Watts, Michael Lissack, David Boje and Robert Cross.

Here’s the link to the paper.