Inter-Organizational Communities of Practice
Inter-Organizational Communities of Practice by C. van WinkelenIn this report, we briefly look at the key drivers behind these trends and the main learning that has been gained about how to design and sustain these communities effectively within organizations. We will then move on to some of the additional issues that need to be considered when communities reach across external boundaries to support inter-organizational collaboration.
The end has the punchline, though. “A group of participants becomes a community through being a community. It is through interacting and experiencing common events that the community is created. “The emphasis on events, in my experience, is well placed, particularly on distributed CoPs. Events act like a pulse, a heartbeat, that can drive the otherwise diffused attention of folks who rarely, or ever exist in a F2F community. This is key to our upcoming online and F2F workshop in Lisbon. I am becoming a community events evangelist.
The question at the heart of this report is how to gain satisfactory returns from the investments made in forming and supporting communities of practice. Having looked at the practical activities needed to support effective communities, the report ends with a view of the way in which the value they generate can be measured.
posted by Nancy White at 7:41 PM
1 Comments:
A somewhat unrelated thought, Nancy--spurred on by your noting that events are like "a pulse, a heartbeat" for communities. I used to teach hybrid courses in which students met every two weeks face-to-face and everything else happened online. In order to keep a "rythm" to the community so that students could stay on track and keep online discussion going, I broke the class down into a number of "beats"--I think there were three or four a week. I would send out a quick email at the beginning of each beat, reminding folks of the activities that should be happening during that beat.
Again, not entirely related to your post here, but perhaps an idea that can help others who are trying to find ways to "drive the otherwise diffused attention" of an online community...
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