More on the simple rules of community forming…
Here is Shawn’s current thinking on community formation:
Simple rule 1: Participating in a community must be easy. Hold meetings on a regular basis�say the first Tuesday of the month. Make the technology dead simple. Avoid technology until you need it.
Simple rule 2: Someone �who matters� must care about what you are doing. In the early stages it might be quite unclear how your community�s activities delivers business value. Consequently, the �people that matter� must initially believe in the concept of a community of practice. More importantly, the core team and then the other members must care about the topic�nothing new there. Knowing what a group cares about can sometimes be difficult to work out. It requires discussions among members to discover the activities people would commit their precious discretionary time to. If you don�t find this, you don�t have a community in which case people will always be too busy. The choice here is to disband or persist in looking for a better topic. This is the point where your community activities should operate like a skunkworks. Low cost and exploratory.
Simple rule 3: Community activities must link to member needs. Remember I said the end result must link to a need. Some people need to be connected, others need public recognition, while some want greater access to power. Your discussions at the outset need to get a sense of the many needs your community should cater for. Running anecdote circles would be a good way to get people to express these needs.
These are good, and they lead me to thinking about process. Over the weekend I was working with a group that actually DOES this kind of work, and what we decided that what we were talking about was shaking out the existing network. It’s not so much a question of assembling pieces together in a network, but rather shaking things up a little bit so that a network (or a community) emerges.
There is a technique in astronomy that small telescope owners like me use for better seeing faint objects. You tap the tube of the scope and that little vibration is enough to cause the faint object to “pop out.” Your eyes see it and can then focus on it and work to resolve details of it.
A fourth principle I would add to Shawn’s list might be that once you have set the process in place, step back and participate as a member of the network instead of it’s controlling hub. A community that is sustainable has no one in charge of it. There is a role for a forming organization, but if you don;t get out of the way fast enough, the community will stick to you, making it dependant upon you for its continued existence. And that is NOT a community.
It’s a question of lead, follow AND get out of the way.
Technorati Tags: community, development, selforganization,
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Nice song in the style of an old American murder ballad.
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Lots of conversations back and forth and here is the latest iteration of the youth suicide prevention summit. I’ll be discussing this with the working group tomorrow and reflecting on further changes then.
- Word document: Summit design ideas
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On the day after the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment is released I stumble across this quote in an intersting passion play about Terry Sciavo:
“When you narrow down your epistemology and act on the premise ‘What interests me is me, or my organization, or my species,’ you chop off consideration of other loops [of the ecosystem]. You decide that you want to get rid of the by-products of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that the eco-mental system called Lake Erie is part of your eco-mental system — and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated into the larger system of your thought and experience.
— Gregory Bateson”
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As a musician one of my favourite things about the web is the way we can trade music on it. I am a music junky and with the rise of file sharing technology, my ears have opened wide at what is out there.
I’ve been toying around with Webjay for a while, which is a way of compiling playlists of music all of which, in my case, is offered free and legally by artists, record labels and others. I have two playlists in the “Little Projects” section to the left, one which is a small collection of Canadian songs and another which is my ever changing top 40 of world music. To those I now add this playlist, the soundtrack of Parking Lot, in which you may find a nice variety of tunes offered somewhat in the spirit of my favourite radio show, Late Junction from BBC Radio Three.
And so I’ll launch this soundtrack with this piece called “Here we Come Around” from Dear Nora.