Full Circle Associates

In my haste, offering undigested pointers to stuff that looks really cool, like this paper Life_of_the_place.pdf (application/pdf Object). It harkens to both the theory and my experience of Communities of Practice. I am going to print this one out and take it on the road with me.

We conclude this paper with a brief mention of issues that seem to be raised on the basis of our data. The sense of community that emerged in this study was built up through participation. As mentioned, this approach to community stands in contrast to approaches designed to foster social engagement through by explicitly encouraging human interaction, for instance with profile matching or other social prods or applications that explicitly try to facilitate human social engagement at a fairly personal level, whether in physically co-present or virtual community situations
(McCarthy et al; Shirky, 2004; boyd, 2004). In the present case we managed to provide an element of social engagement that enabled a modest sense of community though contributing to the life of the place - social connections emerged through joint participation. This is certainly some of the appeal behind many hybrid gaming
experiments, for instance, although not often characterized as such (e.g., Chang, 2004). Like hybrid games, the present deployment was seen as fun – even trivial – but was ultimately valued by members of the community.