Comment

Comment by Mary Adams on February 19, 2010 at 4:49pm

Alice - I keep mulling over your team versus community distinction.

Although I hadn't thought of it explicitly, I think I have sent messages about both community and team.

The community is to get people talking across geographies and across disciplines. I think there is value just in this because this truly is a global and multi-disciplinary problem.

But I have also have had a vision of creating something more. This is shaped by my belief that there is a need to make IC concepts more accessible to mainstream businesspeople. I think the way to do this is to break the concepts into small, digestible pieces and make them available in what I have been calling "Guides." This may be more than a start-up community can handle.

For now, I think that we need to get our existing members to invite friends and colleagues from the field and see what kind of conversations we get going. I am going to send out a bunch of invitations over the weekend.

Keep the feedback coming!

Comment by Alice MacGillivray on February 17, 2010 at 11:17am

Yes, part of the reason I did that community research and publishing was to share that model more widely. For what it's worth with a small study, the model--which had been successful in practice--held up in a formal study. The credit for it should go to Pete Kilner, who is one of the founders of CompanyCommand: a community that now has over 10,000 members and has lasted for many years.

One of the things I suggest you (we) think about is whether we want this to be more like a community or a team. I have seen many communities that grow and thrive because of the quality of relevant conversations and reasonably focused content, along with some quiet, light-handed support. Sub-groups sometimes form organically, with leadership for them emerging in similar ways. Of course this doesn't describe standard approaches to strong teams.

Comment by Mary Adams on February 17, 2010 at 8:34am

Thank you Alice -

I think the graphic of your community leadership model says a lot. It shows the words Content, Conversation, Connections and Context arrayed around Purpose. Is it something you can share?

This is a good reminder that we need to create a clear sense of purpose within our community. I feel strongly that it must be about making IC concepts accessible to mainstream businesspeople.

I have been using the phrase open source to describe how we do this. My idea has been to create simple (<5 pages) Guides that each explain a basic concept or idea. There is an explanation of the basic concept in Discussions >Guides.

I am hoping to get feedback from the community on this....Let me know what you think. Is this the right purpose? Is it realistic?

Comment by Alice MacGillivray on February 15, 2010 at 9:03pm

In my experience, people are often inspired and motivated by different things (think of MBTI profiles and gender differences for example).

There is a model I find quite useful for monitoring and encouraging the health of communities. It was developed in a U.S.-based community of practice. As it hadn't been published in peer reviewed sources, I played with it in a public sector research project and wrote about it in a book chapter: "Knowledge intensive work in a network of counter-terrorism communities." I cannot share it here, but have permission to share it on my website: www.4KM.net. At the moment, it's about 7 items down in the publications area if you are interested.

The model positions purpose as the central concept and uses for types of activities or behaviours to help support that purpose.

Comment by Mary Adams on February 10, 2010 at 6:22pm

Here's a comment on my own post! Just read the perfect follow up to the concept of our community. It comes from Boris Pluskowski and is entitled Defining the Social Team. He says that a successful community is a team with different positions and players. In other words, people that take responsibility for parts of the game. I hope that we will be able to get a core of folks to step up in this way!