Replying to LO28677 --
I strongly support this but feel the clues to how this are done are
fragmented over many different disciplines, some which may surprise you,
but all of which need connecting. Especially after having had lunch on
Sunday with Doc Searls opinion leading blogger, and cluetrainer of markets
and organisations around them as people conversations. Similarly, I am
heavily influenced by Bill Jensen author of Work 2.0 and opinion-leader of
simplicity genre; and by network practice leaders such as Thomas Power
founder of the 11,000 strong e-practice network www.ecademy.com and the
emerging Knowledge Angels approach of the European Union at
www.knowledgeboard.com which I would describe as quite heavily people-up
(not top-down) in its aims to standardise organisation of
knowledge-management
For other 'exotic' examples, this is the core genre of Personal branding
as practised by friends at Tom Peters Company and friends in Sweden who
have wriiten books called Brand You or Brand Me. In partiuclar, Tom Peters
regards this as a necessary tool for aligning organisations that seek to
humanly innovate anything in the future ; my Swedish friends connect Brand
Me with NLP and with the urgent need for society to understand the agent
infrastructure choices we should all insist are made openly so that
peronal brands and personal networks and profiling matches into
communities and directly with people become as productive and learning
rich as the internet could make possible. Brand Manners, the book which
leads the discipline of corporate branding is also very clear that it is
through people that organisational behaviours, relationhsiop value, and
learning system grow of decline.
Meanwhile, another big line is to say that this is all about the
integration of the old hierachical form and the new horizontal forms and
their empowerment by net and community in such community terms as free
agents, CoPs, virtual teams etc. This also goes direct to the measurement,
responsibility and transparency crises all large organisations are
challenged by today, and in which our comunal views will not be rectified
until the numbers monopoly of measurement is transformed into a duopoly of
corporate governance, the second half of which's system map will be
topographically similar to the one being discussed at www.valuetrue.com We
are aiming to get every human discipline or world class framework to
submit a half-page on what transparency practice means from its view so
that we can openly circulate the catalogue and map the connectivity
But moving back more strictly to horizontal and communal forms Below is
one way I have started to structure some ideas that connect with this. If
you wish to exchange personal advice in this area, its hot on my mind for
next 2 weeks
chris macrae, wcbn007@easynet.co.uk - valuation, organisational relationship
systems, corporate brand architecture,
community learning paradigms, future economics www.normanmacrae.com
www.valuetrue.com live co-content managing starts next week
Chief Brand Officer Association, annual retreat Sweden June 26-28 (details
on request)
Draft Chapter Proposal for CoP book calling for chapter contributions This
chapter considers communities in which online facilities are part of the
infrastructure. The perspective taken is an experiential one reflecting
the first author's eight years of hosting content exchanges and
participating in various leading-edge virtual communities focused around
specific organisational practices, corporate, or professional association
competences.
The aim is to classify in non-technical language some of the detailed
factors that appear to sustain or drain the life of communities and to
discuss three examples which may not be perfect but which seem to
illustrate well connected human practices. It is also assumed that online
is seldom the raison d'etre if the community is to enable its members to
learn and do things better. Rather the online tools help people discover
who they want to exchange learning and work with in increasing depth which
in most cases is defined by getting to the stage of making the effort to
meet the person and evolves into jointly organising something.
Essentially the online advantage is to amplify networking opportunities
hugely but most real practices today still involve the extra layer of
working together in what we currently still call a real way. Networking
opportunities may be interpersonal ones or those between micro-communities
which may be quite stable or constantly reforming as people groups. These
have various parallels such as teams or committees in business
organisations and Special Interest Groups in associations or academic
research.
Another purpose of the cases selected is to listen to a testimony of one
the founding developers of the community regarding some of the human
design criteria that were party of the founding principles. In a sense
the choice made reflects key working hypotheses of the first author which
the reader has the right to examine from the start as they condition view
of usability experiences reflecting the typical technology commonly
available between 1996-2002. In the future technology might change making
one of these working hypotheses less essential, or indeed a different
paper would have been written if materially different hypotheses had been
assumed. One reason why this would happen would be if communities being
discussed were assuming that the typical community member had very
technical competences relating to information technology rather than
assuming that the online facilities should not get in the way of any
knowledge worker, which in a networking age is assumed to be almost
everyone who would previously have been described as an office worker and
many other people beyond that.
Key Hypotheses:
-Communities cannot be assembled through a fast-burn resourced model
-Ideally evolve and iterate through low cost experimentation modes, knowing
what is the minimum online connectivity features the community will be
playing with at each iteration. For example, during the time period
discussed, many communities iterated around asynchronous online facilities
by which we mean that if particular people went synchronous they did so
through real meetings or other tools such as the telephone which were
separate from the actual online infrastructure
-Communities should always be exploring every open advantage they can make
use of. This includes: sharing learning from other communities that share in
part of whole the same application service paradigm; connect with members of
other communities as ways of renewing the community and taking its pooled
knowhow to a higher level
-It is important to be transparent about who owns a community; what its
identifying boundaries are; what sorts of values are being exchanged which
also parameterises the responsibility of everyone to nicely and immediately
inform co-members when a behaviour is not one which the community is happy
with.
-In many cases the most lively CoPs have an architecture which connects well
with the personal network building motivations of individual members. A key
architectural decision is the extent to which this is as broad as everyone
has an equal right to promote their network's views as equally expert, or
particular people are the major linking gurus who currently define how our
practice improves and around whom most members are eager to participate as
communal disciples
-There is an opportunity in practice communities to design in working modes
that hierarchical organisational forms were unable to design or use in the
most humanly inspiring ways. This is most relevant when a CoP is parented by
a hierarchical organisation which was pre-digital or location-based in
origin. Whilst most of these organisations are themselves evolving, it is
normally the case that a lot of their culture is lagged and includes some
anti-communal practices in ways that it is reasonable to assume the great
advantage of a CoP involves being free of from its founding day onwards. In
particular the measurements that hierarchical parents use on themselves may
bare no relation to the best standards that a community should seek to make
its system of relationships measurable to. In many cases, a community must
be built on social value exchange before the possibility of more monetary
values can be productively included. Indeed the pattern of this cluster of
hypotheses could be said to be about guaranteeing this community identity is
transparently chartered both inside the living interactions of the community
and by anyone else who may have invested in it.
> >'Organisations learn only through individuals that learn. Individuals'
> >learning does not guarantee organisational learning. But without it no
> >organisational learning occurs.' Senge, Peter, 1994, The Fifth Disipline,
> >Page 139
>
> >Critically evaluate this statement, with particular reference to the
> >interdependency of individual and organisational learning.
--"chris macrae" <wcbn007@easynet.co.uk>
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