At the end of my last post I mentioned that KM (even Talent Management) or social computing need a top-down approach, shift, or message when it comes to collaboration, sharing, and organisational effectiveness…or better put a balanced approach.

Why?

Sure you will get lots of success in sense-making and sharing by facilitating the use of grassroots tools that are bottom-up just like email (but better than email).

BUT, is the use of new tools enough to catapult into a new way of working…it will take a long time to hit that tipping point.

Even if we do all the right things like facilitate, understand human behaviour, create and nurture conditions for participation, have an enterprise-wide concept…I don’t think it’s enough.

We need a complementary top-down shift to a new culture of working, as I said in my last post, a move from a competitive to collaborative organisation.

NOTE: I’m referring to within the walls of an organisation. I’m yet to think about this concept industry-wide ie. companies collaborating, rather than competing…a new type of capitalism I guess…got many links on the natural enterprise, but no time to read them

What do I mean by top-down?

I mean how are we measured and rewarded for what we do…

If I’m rewarded just for my achieving my personal output, I don’t have an incentive to share as what I know gives me the edge, it’s not about the organisation, it’s all about me.

Workers are instilled to be efficient robots, which leads to…I don’t have time to help you out, or an interest, as that is less time that I spend on achieving my objectives, and helping you out doesn’t get me a reward anyway; my objectives are important as that’s what gets me a reward.

We are told to share, but how can we when the senior management strategy doesn’t walk the walk…yes they talk that it’s good to share, but then strategy goes against that ideal.

Can you believe a lot of organisations run this way…this is a strategy to amass an aggregate of personal efficiency ie an incentive to stack a pile of efficient people, at the expense of an effective organisation where the people share what they know with each other so the organisation can adapt, be resilient, innovate, etc…

Why would an organisation do this to itself?

ie. concentrate on cost reduction and efficiency alone by neglecting the big picture, and instead just focus on each worker by rewarding good outcomes. How are you gonna adapt to changes in the industry if you don’t have a connected organisation…sure, you can have lots of intelligent people, but if they are not connected, you will hear lots of “why didn’t we know about you, I didn’t know you were an expert in that, we could of used you to help with this issue”

Workers self organise their behaviour to sometimes ignore this strategy, as it’s being connected that helps you out. You don’t know everything, if you did, what’s the use of an organisation. We get by at work by give and take, you interrupt me today, I’ll interrupt you tomorrow…I’ll forgo some of my time to help you out, as I trust that this will be reciprocated. An organisation is a web of relationships, we all need contacts, to help us achieve our targets.

So yes it’s natural to share, as it’s a need, actually it’s survival…but this needs to be seriously recognised and harnessed as a strategy, and a smart strategy where it cooperates and is cohesive with other strategies. ie you can’t have a strategy about sharing is important, if you have another strategy that essentially says hoarding is important (this conflicting strategy I’m referring to is the essence of this post ie the strategy of what you know gets you ahead of others, it gives you the edge so sharing would be the wrong thing to do…and my objectives get me rewards, so why would I spend time with you).

Anyway, looking back at an old post of Rex Lee’s outstanding blog, I found something very relevant to this meme.

It’s on the negative impact that “well defined measurable objectives and tying them directly to compensation” has on knowledge sharing, and ultimately organisational effectiveness.

“It seems logical that if you do a good job, and it’s linked to your objectives then you should be compensated for this.

The difficulty lies in the individual nature. The first concern is around the competitive aspects of this kind of model. If your knowledge or expertise could really assist someone else but helping them had no relation to your objectives, would you help them? What if we took it one step further. What if your helping of someone else actually hurt your ability to meet your objectives? Perhaps it would take you away from completing your objectives or actually go counter to your objectives? What if the more important thing for the company was helping that other person?

Often a cascading objectives model (one in which, you get your objectives from your boss, and she gets them from her boss, etc..), leads to solio’d thinking. Opportunities that arise that cut across silo’s (and requiring collaboration) are simply never seen. It’s not that people want to be malicious, they simply don’t see the opportunity.

Is it possible to structure objectives, that allow for collaboration that still are well defined, measurable and linked to compensation? The answer depends in what “well defined” means. In theory, an objective about collaborating could resolve this. It’s worked for other organizations. If you go this route though, keep in mind the implications it has on organizational structure as well. Proceed with caution, you’re changing institutional models that may be as old as the organization itself.”

In the next post I want to look at the ROI of spending time helping others.

[ADDED 16/11/09 : Bertrand Duperrin]

“Unlike the general public web, businesses don’t know how not to pass a local cost along to the the whole organization since everyone has to justify the way the allowed funds are used. In brief, businesses don’t understand free across its departments. Rather, their internal policies don’t make that possible.”

[ADDED 16/11/09 : Jack Vinson]

“the business doesn’t reward collaboration. It rewards individual action.”

Thought I’d share a few slides from a presentation I’m giving at work on Communities of Practice (CoP) from a knowledge management perspective.

My aim was to contrast traditional KM of conscripting best practices, with a new approach based on sensemaking pkm and networks…more appropriate tools, design for emergence and ambient awareness, and amplifying how we get things done offline…basically a more cognitive science approach over management science.

A great deal of my visual concept is based on the work of Dave Snowden, who looks at KM from a more anthropological, human behaviour perspective…a lot of his work deals with the notion of “context”, and I guess this is coupled with “intrinsic” motivation or engagement.

I also borrowed from a model by Shell on the concept of a Global Network (CoP), shown to me by Mark Bennett from Learning Collaboration.

Basically, from another perspective, I’m trying to do in 2 slides what T Systems did in 26 out of the 51 slides of their brilliant slidedeck, The revolution of knowledge part1

KM as blood bank

I also really like Mark Bennett’s symbolic way of thinking about it like a blood bank (taking and giving blood)

• Sense-making and asking questions (taking blood)
• Blogging/Sharing/Peer Assist and reflective KM like AAR, Lessons (giving blood)

Sense-making KM and CoPs - Just-in-time vs Just-in-case

The following slides are a contrast to supply-side KM, or just-in-case KM.

Also note this is KM from a Community of Practice perspective, as that’s what’s relevant to my day job. I guess one day I can alter them to include other KM activities and a more network perspective.

Sensekmaking KM and CoPs - Just-in-time vs Just-in-case

Different ways of engaging knowledge

Related to this sense-making concept of people and context in the just-in-time KM model is Nancy Dixon’s model on the different types of knowledge needs or interactions, in relation to: the level of cognitive diversity required, the degree of relationship (tie/trust) with others to source that information, facilitation/support, and the social computing tools that can create conditions for sense-making.

Embedded KM

Another related post is on Embedded KM by Andrew Gent.

I think knowledge sharing can be done as it happens (blogs, wikis, etc..) but also as a reflection (anecdote circles, AAR, etc..), and it’s the latter that Andrew is thinking about…how best to share lessons and good practices from one project to the next. Since the project is over, people don’t put great emphasis or care on reviewing it, as they are busy moving on to the next project, so Andrew talks about embedding this so it doesn’t seem a chore.

But he also makes a very relevant point to the heart of KM and motivation. When capturing information it has to become usable, and this takes effort on the contributor to make it findable, otherwise it’s up to the user to find the content and make it relevant to them. To make it usable and relevant takes too much effort for return, it has low intrinsic motivation for the contributors.

The challenge is a sweetspot where it’s usable enough, and contributing is simple enough…and what do you know, this works best as conversation, as we get sharing and context. And Andrew has an embedded way to trigger this reflective conversation as a part of an organisational process.

Andrew says:

“Rather than trying to make all project knowledge available to anyone, what if we simply try to expand the current knowledge base incrementally over time? Rather than collecting the review documents, why not include at least one reviewer from an unrelated project to each review? This could be an architect, implementer, or project manager as long as that person can provide an objective, outside view of the project progress.”

“…the outside reviewer helps to keep the project team “honest”. It is easy for internal reviews to become formulaic rubber stamp events if those involved are all working on the project.They do not have enough distance to see hidden pitfalls and will resist calling foul on people they have to work with on a daily basis.”

“…including outsiders gives at least one person a much more indepth and personal knowledge than could ever be gained by reading a set of historical documents with no one to explain them. Another value from a KM perspective is the opportunity the reviewer and the project team have to exchange knowledge, hints, and tips on the fly and in context of the discussion.”

“…the program then becomes essentially self-managing from a KM perspective. The project management teams are responsible for ensuring outside reviewers are included and with each review, little by little, knowledge is shared across the organization.”

Competitive vs Collaborative culture

The micro intentions or local behaviour involved in the the Just-in-time vs Just-in-case concept actually emerge a macro picture…and that’s a change in the internal dynamics of an organisation from a competitive to collaborative organisation…perhaps from teams to crews.

Why?

We create the conditions for engagement, transparency, agility, trust and awareness…where knowledge sharing becomes a magical by-product….not creating a knowledge sharing culture, rather creating conditions for one to emerge.

I know it’s about the people, not the tools, but it’s important to understand the design thinking involved…these new tools are designed for the people, where we can now achieve the original aims of KM. The use of these tools can be a catalyst for change. For more on this see my posts, Has KM died, and resurrected as social computing?, Knowledge and its facilitators.

You could say social computing is a bottom-up strategy (and is has total effect when enterprise-wide), but I think we can also have a top-down strategy, because no matter how enabled workers can be to express and converse in the open, they will be hesitant, feel unsafe, uncomfortable and not confident if this new type of enterprise interaction is not promoted or pushed from the top.

NOTE: social computing is not just bottom-up, managers can seed crowdsourcing/opinion/reviews

A while back I posted, Is knowledge sharing all about your pay cheque? (which was amplified by Stewart Mader).

In this post I contrasted a picture where people are influenced to share or hoard depending on how their performance is viewed from senior management.
If you are appraised on your personal output, then you will hoard and not collaborate as much as you have an incentive to own all the output, forgoing a more quality or optimum deliverable, than if you were to leverage the talent of the organisation.
On the other hand if you are appraised on a group output (how much you collaborate, your effectiveness in networking with the optimum people for your tasks) then this will instill a less competitive culture due to more knowledge sharing and collaboration. This is a cleverly designed strategy as the the workers themselves will be pushing quality from others as they all hold each other accountable…a culture of interdependency.

I really like how Stewart put it:

“People are used to thinking of their workday activities as indirectly affecting the bottom-line because the competition model essentially keeps the average employee in the dark about how things really work, or how healthy the organization is. The sharing model makes it much clearer, so the average employee can see the impact of her or his work.”

Betrand Duperrin also parallels these thoughts:

“They would be more efficient if they helped each other? But in order to get a good evaluation and the related rewards and bonuses they have, in the best case, to ignore each other, in the worse case to play the one against another.”

Learned behaviour

Beyond performance appraisals, what about a top-down message about the importance of connection and collaboration, just like the way organisations drill the message of quality and safety.

When I attended Mark Bennett’s masterclass on CoPs, he mentioned that safety is a learned behaviour (people are irrational and do unsafe things like drink driving, etc), and quality is a learned behaviour (people take shortcuts and ignore procedures and processes like emailing a document to a client for review, rather than sending through a formal transmittal via document control), and so to, collaboration can be a learned behaviour.

But I don’t think the result of this would be as effective in a fundamental way.

• If you are unsafe, you risk getting sued, bad accidents cause a bad reputation with clients, contractors and workers.
• If you are of low quality, you cut corners for short term gain, long term loss, and perhaps risk litigation.
• If you have low collaboration, you risk a less optimum job, low awareness and transparency and communication leads to low cooperation and cohesiveness, and you are less agile to adapt to change.

All three have bad consequences if ignored

• The first two is a risk in reputation, but also a benchmark risk, and more importantly the consequences are very meaty-litigation, death.
• The last one also is a risk in reputation (losing or not winning deals because of bad information flow does effect reputation/attractiveness), the industry benchmark is still a young thing in relation to collaboration, BUT unlike the others the consequences are not as meaty, no-one dies, we don’t get sued.

So I think because the consequences of not being collaborative don’t show explicitly like someone being hurt, and losing face (as this is seen as a quality process issue rather than collaboration/information flow), then we tend to be more reactive, or it takes a back seat in our attention. You still get work done not being collaborative (you do suffer later in frustration as you can’t find stuff or you aren’t aware of something you should be aware of), it’s just all these micro interactions, lead to a big picture of not being agile, and attractive to a client…if they can’t get their s*!t together, how are they gonna service us.

Related
I don’t want to share, that’s counter to meeting my objectives…and reward!!

Not long ago I posted about how our Communities of Practice (CoP) are hitting a sweetspot…bottom-up and grass roots tools that provide more of a sense of place and better coordination over email, and are more enabling than the Intranet.

Great cross-functional CoPs are emerging like Bulk Materials Handling, Sustainable Development, Software Architecture and Approaches, 3D Visualisation and Animation, Bauxite and Alumina, etc..

But there is something else that’s emerging that we didn’t quite expect.

And we know why?

It’s because our CoPs are just online spaces with a bunch of tools (blogs, forums, wikis, docs, and a homepage).

This package doesn’t make them a CoP, it’s just what we called them, as that’s what the vendor calls them…nothing wrong with this…

Basically, these online tools don’t define the group or how it operates…their just tools. This also hooks into how the Socialtext staff differentiate them from past tools (transactional vs Interactive)

Anyway…

So the unexpected emergence is that CoPs are being used for lots of different things that are cutting into products we already use…why again…because people want to be empowered and engaged which distributed power (less control) enables.

What has emerged?

Let’s start with the answer and it’s effect: blogs, forums, wikis need to be features of existing products, and when they are how’s that gonna effect what has currently happened.

We don’t just have cross-functional CoPs ie. people distributed in the organisation in different teams, projects, business units, and levels of authority who come together in a space to support and learn about a common topic…which makes for a more agile organisation…it’s looking in your own backyard and connecting the talent dots.

Here are the main online groups that have surfaced.

Ad-hoc tasks

I’ve blogged about this before.

People want to do temporary tasks in an online space rather than hidden in email.

Our CoPs are more portal like with permissions and the rest, they are not one click set-up, they need a bit of upfront design.
- your CoP or mine for this task, but your not a member of my CoP…these task spaces end up buried in a CoP somewhere, they have no homepage of their own, the hosting CoP members may not like that their CoP has a unrelated parasite group

They are not the best spaces or timely and simple enough for an ad-hoc task.

For this we would need something like the new OpenText Social Media product, or Jive SBS (both of these also include a social network).

Or perhaps something more on-the-fly like Activities on Lotus Connections, or a future version of Google Wave…see more.

And Traction seems like the most flexible product around, I hear BlueKiwi is in this space as well…see more.

Initatives/Pilots/Crowdsourcing/Events

We are finding these a sweetspot, just like cross-functional CoPs.

We are starting a review of our project lifecycle process, which is to be coordinated in the CoP, basically where the organisation comes together in a communal space.

Support

I’ve blogged about this before.

It’s one thing to have a CoP to troubleshoot within a team, but it’s another thing when internal customers start asking questions for support through a CoP.

Personally I think it’s great, as people have an open place to search for past answers or even offer answers, and if you subscribe you can learn along the way.

BUT, this is cutting into the organisations official Support database. We still need this official and sophisticated tool for support management, but CoPs as a support tool are definitely cutting into their lunch.

Teams/Business Units/Office unit

These groups have a section in our corporate Document Management System (DMS)…it’s basically a set of folders.

Why are they using CoPs?

Because in the process of creating documents we have conversations about review.
Because we like to discuss issues.
Because we like to broadcast news.
Because we like to share experiences.
And email just doesn’t cut it.
And the DMS just doesn’t have these conversational tools, or a homepage that represents the group (well, they do, it’s the Intranet, but see the next point)

Intranet

I’ve blogged about this before.

Someone came up to me the other day and said, they love that CoPs are two-way, and that they can update their homepage (that acts like a portal) whenever they like.

As a result of this empowerment they mentioned that their intention is to no longer have any of their pages hosted on the Intranet, but instead, when people click on their business practice link on the Intranet, it will just take them straight to the CoP.

What’s the next natural step, that the global CoP hompage becomes the Intranet itself.

Client Projects

We have a DMS on another server with a different look and feel and processes that suit the context of projects.

But again, just like Teams/Business Units they lack a homepage and conversation tools.

Project teams want a homepage as a jump off point (a bunch of folders doesn’t cut it).

They also want this homepage to display conversations that are currently happening at the moment in email silos, this way the mechanical guys can eaves drop on piping conversations and vice versa, so we are more aware. A blog for project updates and broadcast news gets people on the same page.

Organisations are not (well maybe) Complex Adaptive Systems, so we need to make them open and transparent as much as we can, so people can be ambiently aware, and therefore better cooperate amongst the parts, and ultimately adapt to changes or even be preventative.

I have not created online CoP spaces for these projects as this is the turf of DMS, and having two spaces for the one thing seems odd, but people will self-organise their way around any design.

Let’s sum this up

CoPs are a sweetspot for great emerging unofficial groups, but they are also cutting into the following existing products:

• Email (this was the intention)
• Offical support database
• Corporate DMS
• Project DMS
• Intranet

And it seems we need a product to handle ad-hoc tasks.

Summary, future ponderings, and a suggestion

The original idea for CoPs was cross-functional practices eg Bulk Materials Handling

But as we can see because email, the DMS, and the Intranet are not as enabling, people are using CoPs as an alternative for everything.

In a way this CoP experiment has surfaced all sorts of needs, which is a good low cost experiment (naturally emerging needs analysis).

Who needs a survey, needs analysis, or just implement and hope it works as it was a good top-down idea…when the emergence that has surfaced from the existence from CoPs has given you the answer to all this pondering for free.

What it has surfaced is a need for our DMS and the Intranet to become socialised…and also a way to do ad-hoc tasks.

I’m seeing all this happening, and perhaps need to suggest a taskforce so us people running all these products can converge.

This convergence will be interesting. If these tools do get socialised, what will then happen?

Will teams decide to export their CoPs to their revamped DMS?

And if the Intranet offers the same tools as our CoPs, but with an Intranet backdrop, will some groups then export their CoPs to the revamped Intranet?

So maybe one day we will come full-circle, and CoPs will be just for cross-functional groups…as wiki, blogs, forums will be features of all products.

What’s the food for thought for people wanting to socialise their organisation online!

Perhaps firstly revamp your existing systems with social tools. ie. Work on your in-the-flow before, or perhaps in parallel with your above-the-flow.

• Intranet and business units/teams (Confluence or Thoughfarmer)
• Client Projects (Basecamp)
• Communities and Social network (Jive SBS)
• Ad-hoc tasks (OpenText Social Media)
• And what about micro-blogging (Socialtext signals)

See what’s happening here, a lot of the tools above do the same things eg. Socialtext has a social network and workspaces, OpenText has a social network, etc…

Also our projects need sophisticated document cycle functionality which Basecamp will not do, so in this case our existing DMS needs to be revamped.

I’m thinking perhaps an Intranet tool like Thoughtfarmer or Confluence could handle them all…except for client projects (requires document lifecycle processes)

Here’s a snapshot of different CoPs that are emerging:

More Than Cops

More than CoPs

By examining the CoPs, or better put, “online groups” at my work, they seem to be:

1. Teams/BU (execute work)
- which shouldn’t be called a CoP even though it is…who cares in the end, I’m happy people are using the tools

2. Teams/BU (learning/support spaces)
- this type of CoP is usually combined with the CoP above (point 1)

3. Cross-functional (traditional learning CoPs)
- a classic example is our Software Architecture and Approaches CoP where people from various units/teams come together to share, learn, help…and to bring that intelligence back to their tasks
- when we need help at work we often look to Google, Twitter, etc…why not create an environment where we can look to each other within the organisation

4. Internal user support spaces (customer service CoP)
- I run a Facilitators CoP where I communicate and troubleshoot with people that run their own CoPs
- These types of CoPs can be at the general user level, or for the support people themselves

5. Teams communicating to the business (customer CoP)
- using a CoP, rather/complementary to an email newsletter
- sometimes this type of CoP is combined with the CoP above (point 4)

6. Role-based
- people on different projects and teams, but share the same role…eg Project Managers, Project Systems Managers

7. We also have others like: interest groups, crowdsourcing, events, new initiatives, office happenings, specific tasks (although this last one suits a more simple application like ad-hoc groups…ie a bunch of people from different teams/units coming together temporarily to execute a task)

We don’t yet have any Client/Customer-based (support/crowdsource CoP, or a CoP with suppliers)

“…before you leap into reinventing your processes for transformative value, step back. You can’t collaborate with your customers before you learn to collaborate with your employees. In the spectrum of risk taking, its best to deploy from the inside-out.”

Just realised I posted something similar a while back, Internal community types that get you viral exposure.

Looks like I was prophetic when I posted What’s the difference between Intranet 2.0 and a social network with groups.

Why do I say this?

At work we have many active online Communities of Practice (CoPs), some are learning and sharing, and others are customer based information and support CoPs, or even both.

In my post Online Communities of Practice are a sweet spot! I highlighted how CoPs cut into email conversations and Intranet information.

That is, rather than using email for questions, communications, support, we use CoP tools.

Some CoPs also like the fact that the CoP can be responsive and agile compared to the Intranet. Some of our CoPs are going beyond conversations and using the CoP as a portal to profile all the information about the group and services the group offers, as you would do on an Intranet.

What they like about the CoP is that you can update it yourself daily, and you can get feedback and questions from internal customers, as well as communicate to them.

What happened the other day is a CoP facilitator mentioned that the CoP was quickly replacing their need for an Intranet page. They said soon, they wish to not host information on the Intranet, but instead just have a hyperlink for their practice that launches to the CoP.

Whoa…CoPs are cutting into the Intranet…it’s not gonna be pretty if people start ditching the Intranet.

See what’s happening, social tools are becoming a catalyst for change, but it’s not explicit, it’s just a by-product…you are not having a revolution, it’s just you start using the new thing, and the old thing becomes ignored.

What will happen if the Intranet loses control to CoPs…their worst case scenario to authoritativeness and all things official and vetted.

As global CoP facilitator I’m not being a traffic stealer, rather a few of my customers are choosing to do this themselves, and when they ditch the Intranet, people interested in their information will also be visiting the CoP, not the Intranet.

So not only are CoPs enablers for emerging groups that are not official or even mature enough to be on the Intranet, but they are starting to attract existing groups that live on the Intranet as perhaps a new place of residence.

What does this tell us? People want to be agile, they want to be more transparent and connect, they want to be close to real-time, they want to be empowered to sense-make and do it themselves…a distributed organisation…worker engagement.

The Intranet better notice this and do something about it?

If they do, where does that leave CoPs?

If the Intranet becomes a social network with group pages, will our CoPs then be absorbed into the Intranet?

This was my whole point of my past post.

You can have a “social network with groups” standalone internal website (which is promoted on the Intranet), or you can have the same thing designed as the Intranet itself.

It’s uncanny, I read a blog post yesterday by the inspiring Peter Bregman on focusing on one thing when you want to make a change or a difference…less is more. Just now, I realised that I practiced this very thing the other day.

Here are some excerpts from an email exchange I had with our global librarian at work.

LIBRARIAN: I’m really having difficulties finding the time to set up the Library CoP. Can you set it up?

ME: If you like I’d rather assist you guys rather than do it for you.
Do you have someone you can delegate to?
Would you like to start off with a telecon, as I need to know the purpose for your CoP, who the audience/s are

LIBRARIAN: Currently, we have no manpower to even start teleconferencing. But if you don’t have the time either, I understand.
Based on our list of projects, CoP is currently a nice to have tool.

ME: Why don’t you send me a blueprint for what you want to achieve, and someone in your team (preferable someone passionate) and I will do our best to help you out.

Why do you want a CoP?

1. A space to learn and share with your team?

2. A place to coordinate tasks and assist/support each other?

3. A place where general people from our work can visit and ask a question, and also subscribe to blogs about current awareness eg. new journals

It can be for all of these, if so, let’s just try one thing first, but we will keep future needs in mind when we design

Who will be the main facilitator?

- this is a person who has time and passion to drive this
- this is not you as you are too busy, but it could be you once it’s up and running

As you know a community is all about conversations in the open (rather than private in email)
- but it can also have a portal element or website feel where you list all your stuff and information
- but you seem to already have an Intranet page for this

If we slowly chip away at it we will get there.

Perhaps I’ll ask this question:

What’s your most pressing issue or process that the community can make better?

Is it 1. learning/sharing, or 2. coordinating/assisting each other, or 3. dealing with your customers

ME: I suggest using the CoP just for your team, so you guys get used to using it, but if your most pressing issue is to get info out to your customers then we can start with that

eg. If you send Journal Table of Contents emails you can publish that in a blog instead and then email the customers the link to the blog.

Even better is if people subscribe, then you don’t have to email some of those people the link to the blog post.

This way the blog will act as an archive, and people can visit it…email is just a private letter box, whereas a blog is an open house

Think of the different email exchanges you have with customers, and the ways you inform customers, and we can re-purpose that using CoP tools

I’m finding that some Communities of Practice (CoPs) at work are lacking leadership even though they have a community leader.

This is a broad statement, and there can be many reasons for this, but in this post I want to focus on one particular reason.

This has happened on several CoPs where the team leader has appointed their personal assistant or a nominated team member to set up a CoP…or the team leader has borrowed a person from another team leader as they like how they designed their CoP.
NOTE: Personally I would be inspired by CoPs with active and frequent conversation, over a well designed website.

The reason for their approach is that the community leader is technically proficient at designing and using the CoPs. The problem is that this person is not a Subject Matter Expert (SME), and does not have the interest, passion or time to facilitate the community in a non-technical way.

Facilitation is not just technical design/support, part of it is monitoring how people use the community and encouraging things, and re-purposing others…I briefly listed Facilitator’s duties at the end of my post, Community of Practice for Facilitators : pilot, adoption and participation.

My point here, is that CoPs need a breadth of facilitator’s, the head facilitator being the Community Leader.

It’s important to have the technical facilitator to cover the technical parts, but most important is the SME. Or rather whoever the community leader is must have a group of facilitators that handle different aspects of a CoP…technical, SME, etc…

Really, if it was an offline CoP then you would not need the technical facilitator at all.

Pause

I have realised for a while that this has been happening, and as the global facilitator I have picked up the pieces, but now that we have lots of CoPs, I’m finding I don’t have time, and I should be “training the trainer” anyway. That’s why I’m currently working on a facilitators workshop, which I’ve always intended to do, but never got the time. I communicate and support to facilitators in the Facilitators CoP, but I need a good real-time focused presentation and conversation to make this stick.

What tipped me over to blog these thoughts?

As a global facilitator I subscribe to all blogs and forums in all CoPs, and I stress that this is important for facilitators to do in their CoPs. This way you have total awareness of the activity, and you can encourage and re-purpose behaviours.

As global facilitator I eaves drop on the activity in all CoPs, but I never interfere, instead I congratulate/assist/recommend to the facilitator of that CoP with some action to take, as it’s not my place to talk to their members.

Anyway…

In one particular CoP we crowdsourced ideas into one forum, and from those 500 ideas we created 10 forums to house them all.

I don’t really agree with the next step, but it was decided that the heavy contributors on a topic were then nominated to be in charge of that forum.
- liase with the lead on bringing some of those ideas into fruition
- keep the forum going as general conversations about that topic

To my surprise they are doing OK, but could be going better if each forum had a person who volunteered themselves, something Samuel Driessen agreed with, but I can’t remember where he left that comment.

Anyway, I have noticed that in one of the forums called “Collaboration”, the person put in charge of that forum was also the project manager for our Office Communicator deployment (instant messaging/conferencing). He posted a new forum topic called “Office Communicator Tip of the week”…which yes, sounds like a blog post.
And in the last couple of months he has posted replies to that forum topic to publish new tips. In essence, he’s using one forum thread as a blog, where each new post is a reply to the forum topic.

I’m glad he’s participating, but his enthusiasm can be channeled to the right tool for the job. In the future that forum thread will be a needle in a haystack, it will be a thread with 50 replies. Instead he could have his own place using a blog, where the whole blog is about his topic, rather than be buried as one of many topics in a forum. The blog will have more presence, it can be furnished around his topic, and he will be more recognised…he and his know-how become a destination.

My point though is that there is no-one to notice and harness this, as that CoP only has a technical facilitator who is not looking out for this sort of thing. The CoP instead needs a SME or a leader who cares about the CoP and it’s members.

I mentioned on Twitter the other day that teams at my work don’t have web 2.0 type online team spaces, but Communities of Practice do. So what happens is that teams are using our CoP tools…and then of course these online team spaces are referred to as CoPs, which is a mistake, as the technology does not define the group dynamics (CoPs are usually naturally emerging groups about learning/sharing, whereas teams are managed groups that execute assigned outcomes).

Team working CoPs

Teams using CoPs to execute tasks, can carry on with their team dynamic of getting stuff done, manage and measure, produce outcomes/deliverables.

Team sharing/support CoPs

But more common are teams using CoPs for sharing/learning/communication/support (troubleshooting). And in this case it’s important that these team sharing type CoPs encourage facilitation rather than try run the community like a team.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the team lead and sub-team leads are too busy to run the CoP space, so a team member is given the task to run the CoP, which is sometimes like pushing up a hill, as they don’t have influence and feel they are bugging people who might not care about the CoP to start with, as they are automatically a member by default of being in the team, rather than accepting an invite. And if the lead and sub-leads are not role-model contributors then this makes it a real hard chore.

Regular sharing and learning cross-functional CoPs

For more on this point about group dynamics see my post, Team-based CoPs compared to cross-functional CoPs.

Ad-hoc groups

Then we have people coming together from different parts of the organisation who request to use a CoP space for their ad-hoc group, to work on a task like fixing a process, etc… These spaces are often more short-lived. Again this really isn’t a traditional CoP…again the technology (CoP tools) do no define the group dynamic.

Anyway, these ad-hoc groups should really be self-serve, I really feel like a bottleneck, and most of the time people don’t bother and use email because their synchronous to asynchronous flow ain’t smooth and effortless.

Sponsor vs Self-serve

Betrand Dupperin picked up on this notion of self-serve creation online group spaces, and from reading his post it seems he was more clear in his explanation.

For traditional CoPs we ask that the requestor has a community sponsor…this is important as online CoPs take time to run, and that is time the manager is allowing for, that could be spent on execution.
If there was a notice from the very top that people can spend time away from or related to tasks (like Google’s 20% time), then self-serve would be OK, but at the moment we need the requestor to note that her immediate boss is ok with this.
NOTE: we have a side issue that the CoP tools we are using are complicated to set up for a regular user, so self-serve might still be an issue from a design perspective.

Now, for ad-hoc group work, this really doesn’t require a sponsor, as the time you spend in the ad-hoc group space is time doing the task itself anyway.
So what we have to do, is work with the vendor to make simple versions of our CoP tools, where there is just one stream, and simple permissions…as stripped down as possible so it’s close to the ease of using email. This way these ad-hoc groups can be self-serve.

I see Jive SBS takes this approach where they have community spaces and group spaces, where the group spaces are self-serve and more basic.

Would people use these ad-hoc groups as traditional CoPs, probably, but they wouldn’t look like flashy websites like our regular CoPs.

I guess that’s where we are, the solution might actually create an issue…personally I would not see it as an issue but see it as emergence, and perhaps this momentum as a catalyst for the allowance of work time spent sharing and learning…not explicitly like 20% of your time, but just embedded into your day.

So what do you think?

1. Teams or departments manage their own communities
   - we refuse CoPs that tread on the turf of an existing team or department
2. CoPs require a sponsor
   - Bottom-up request, Top down creation
3. Ad-hoc groups self-serve

And what do you do if ad-hoc group spaces are used as CoPs?

Would it matter, as the ad-hoc group spaces would be so simple that the facilitator does not need to spend time managing permissions, and up keeping the space. But people may still be spending a portion of their time contributing.

A while ago I wrote a post called Enabling communities, and today I had exactly the same experience that inspired me to write that post.

Here are some points from our discussion.

• I am trying to set up a CoP for people with experience in 3D animation and visualisation.
• This is a specialist area with only a few of us officially doing this role.
• But recently I have noticed a lot of people with experience coming out of the woodwork ie. engineers and the like who have experience with some of the software…I know that around the globe there are several people with this expertise.
• I would like to set up a CoP for a couple of us, and then attract some of these people
  - the CoP as a way to amplify what’s already happening
• We have a lot of work, and it would be good if anyone could help us out, rather than sourcing outside help
  - why spend money externally, when we have the talent internally
  - this ties in with my post, We are more than our job title describes
• We also want to use the CoP to gather what our company needs are for 3D animation.
• Besides conversations, the CoP will also be a great “place” to showcase our gallery.
• We are inhouse specialists, and we want the word to get out that we exist

I really like this last point
- email is not a place
- the Intranet is not going to promote these guys (it’s not interactive anyway)

The online CoP is going to harness their talent, and offer a space where they can be known…then only after this grassroots effort, where they may one day prove themselves as a viable component of our workplace, will they get an official spot on the Intranet.

I mentioned similar CoPs eg. Software Development, Learning and Development…and that some people here in Perth are flash gurus.
He said, ohhh…we just required a flash guru for a job here in the Canada office, we couldn’t find one and had to source externally.

Need I say more, if we are visible and participate, we can then connect and converse, and ultimately collaborate…and generate work (connect the human resources so they are optimising the collective talent).

The theme of this post is do it yourself enabling tools, that allow grass roots efforts to emerge and be seen.

These new bottom-up social tools are surfacing opportunities that the top-end of the business are not thinking of, but are getting traction as knowledge workers now have a way to engage and propel.

KM or Enterprise 2.0 is not only about aligning to business strategy, but instead allowing workers to actively participate, creating their own value, where ultimately what they are doing can be noticed and officially be added as a strategy.

Top-down crowdsourcing is one thing, but bottom-up emergence of invention is another thing…we are not here to just give input to top-down ideas, but the top can notice what we are doing at the street level, and say “I like that, I’m glad we give you tools to demonstrate your talent.”

This is not a post about social computing deploying/piloting/adoption in general. All these are applicable on many levels eg. a person implementing across the whole organisation, within a department, across a couple of departments, within a group, etc…

Of late we have seen posts by folks at ThoughtFarmer and Socialtext on pilot/implementation methods. These are great posts and show the difference between focused phased piloting and no pilot at all. I may cover these posts at a later date, as my post today is more on adoption or participation at the group level.

My focus is not on the social computing practitioner, but rather on a regular person wanting to run an online Community of Practice (CoP). It’s more about the social computing practitioner helping a CoP Facilitator help themselves.

ie what are the conditions that a facilitator can create to get their CoP off the ground.

I can’t help myself, just quickly…the Socialtext post above refers to the interactive nature of social software (compared to transactional) where scale and network effects are essential to actually see the potential and emergence. And this is so true for enterprise wide tools such as social networks, microblogging, blogosphere, etc..

But this is not always the case with social computing islands such as CoPs. You don’t need network effects for a group space to work, you just need willing and interested members…and in regards to a team, you need a task or issue to tackle where social tools will replace current tools. I went in depth into this in my post, Do group tools get more traction due to not requiring network effects.

Just to mix it up, group spaces aren’t just about the talent of the group, the task/agenda, and how they work with social tools, which a pilot helps with…they are also about others roaming from CoP to CoP, and as a visitor being able to ask a CoP a question or perhaps answer something…this is serendipity and emergence that will only present itself with scale (it is less likely to happen in a pilot).

The two takeaways here are

1. social tools to help you do what you already do better

2. connecting the enterprise to increase cross-team awareness, cooperation, collaboration, ideas, sourcing information (who knows what), serendipity, opportunities, diversity of emergence…

Basically the more connected an organisation is, the more productive and effective they are. As I alluded to in my social PKM post, that a whole bunch of personally productive people does not make the organisation necessarily productive.

Oops, I wasn’t meant to get into this in this post!

What are the reasons for a pilot again?

• Helps to discover and squash tech issues before release

• Helps to discover and assist in user issues

- that’s why a cross-section of people is important in the pilot

• Deployment team can get an idea of early good practices, codes of conduct, showcase examples

- and will be prepared with the knowledge to help a greater number of people and issues when comes release time

- the more tech and usability issues found and documented in pilot stage the more room this makes to devote time to championing and facilitating

• Stewart Mader has similar thoughts…a good one is use cases in how you can use wikis, he says:

“The teams involved in the pilot would help define and model wiki uses that can then be shown as examples during the wiki rollout to the rest of the organization. This embeds the right kind of uses throughout the organization, and ensures sustained use of the tool.”

Many points in this post have been enrichened by a podcast with Stewart Mader, here’s some notes.

WHAT ARE THE CONDITIONS THAT A FACILITATOR CAN CREATE TO GET THEIR COP OFF THE GROUND?

Following on from my post on workshopping and piloting a new community are the adoption factors a facilitator can massage to get participation off the ground.

After creating a community that everyone wants (or if it’s a task space; finding an issue to solve/fix a process), and piloting it to test it’s use, you will have done all the right things to get started on the right foot, you will have hopefully circumvented any fundamental obstacles.

Next is to create conditions for people to use the community; you need interactions and conversation to grow the community. This requires facilitation, guidance and some tactics or notions to be aware of when dealing with getting a group of people to channel their time into a certain direction.

We all agree the community was a great idea, and here it is, but some people have cold feet, or find it’s unfamiliar. There is an unintentional resistance, and this can be facilitated or nurtured with some points about adoption.

“…people don’t resist change, they resist being changed”
- Peter Bregman

“…resistance is not so much about the change; it’s all about being changed”
- Peter Vajda

“Resistance to change is situation specific, not an attribute of an individual or group”
- Nancy Dixon

We have already asked the questions (needs analysis), workshopped and piloted, so what do we need to know for it to grow or start breathing, and sustain a heartbeat.

Design and Structure

• People need to be a click or two away from what they need to do

• If it’s too complex people won’t have the time to learn, they need to orient themselves with ease

• Create a guide on how, and when to use each tool (better still incorporate it into the design)

• Blank slates don’t help (people are used to structured tools that are designed for a specific purpose, and are not used to the idea of flexing unstructured tools to fit their needs)

- I like ThoughtFarmers idea of usage scenarios

• Create a stickiness factor so people return (frequent blog posts, a communal wikipedia)

- are you appealing to all members

Frequency

• Core group of bloggers to do weekly columns

• Whenever something happens, blog about it
eg. I uploaded a presentation into our library, go check it out…

Email Interaction

• If it’s not in your inbox it doesn’t exist

- people are more likely to react if it comes to them

• Also being able to publish via email is handy

Peer to Peer influence

• Sometimes people will only adopt if their close colleagues are participating

• Prior to this they have not dedicated the time to investigate, but if a close colleague finds it of value, then this will influence them to give it a try

• Again, we are influenced by people we trust, more than a training programme or by others we don’t know well. We take recommendations from people we value.

Eg. If someone recommends a movie I may not go, but if a friend does there is more chance I will go.
The same applies to participating in CoPs (if my trusted colleague or someone I respect is doing it, I may give it a go).

EXAMPLE

Peter and Joe are both Project Managers who attended a training session on communities. The online tool offers all the solutions to their needs about communication, awareness, sharing and learning.

When they got back to their desks Joe had a look at the communities and just didn’t have time to learn them…if the design was more appealing and intuitive, perhaps Joe would have delved further. A couple of months later Joe and Peter are chatting and Peter tells Joe of the brilliant transition his team has made to using online communities over emails and attachments. Peter told Joe it took a lot of getting used to, discipline and facilitating, but eventually it became part of their routines (it’s the way stuff is done around here now).

Joe really values Peter’s work ethic and they are mates and trust each other, help each other out…they have a history together. Due to this close relationship Joe has decided that if Peter thinks it’s good, then it must be, as past history shows that Joe trusts, respects and admires Peter and his endeavors. Indirectly Peter has influenced Joe to give it a try.

This example shows us that a training session is just one aspect to gaining adoption. We are more prone to take the time to try things out, based on recommendations by someone you trust over someone else that does not have as much influence on your decision-making.

What does this say…if you want to influence someone, influence their peers or people they respect and admire, and this will in turn make it more attractive or motivated for them to take up your offer.

I guess case studies are also influential as they can make known (to some degree) the worthiness, risk and return on trying something out…time or attention is also a factor.

People are like that; take up tends to increase when people can see others didn’t get hurt or they had a success, so it’s now safe to join…let others do the work first. I guess those who test the waters first, get to learn from their mistakes first hand (which is the best type of learning), and they are also perhaps the innovators or cutting edge people who reap the benefits or become known for their endeavors as the pioneers.

At my wife’s work there is a campaign to build a unique service centre for children who have been taken away from their families. A lot of high level people have been approached and have shown interest, but have not committed. But they noticed that when one person chose to commit, then this had a chain effect where those previous people that were approached also decided to commit.

This has an amazing snowball effect when people are visibly connected in online networks. Since we have more ambient awareness of each others actions, it doesn’t take long for people to see what their peers are doing and choose to follow…visibility and participation is the fundamental key.

There is more chance for peer to peer adoption for any old thing when people are connected in online networks; the irony of this post is we are trying to get them to be participants of online networks in the first place (actually this post is about communities, but you know what I mean).

Peter Bregman points to a study which illustrates our nature of peer influence:

“You could tell the children you expect them to eat their vegetables. And reward them with ice cream if they did. You could explain all the reasons why eating their vegetables is good for them. And you could eat your own vegetables as a good role model. Those things might help.

But Birch found one thing that worked predictably. She put a child who didn’t like peas at a table with several other children who did. Within a meal or two, the pea-hater was eating peas like the pea-lovers.

Peer pressure.

We tend to conform to the behavior of the people around us. Which is what makes culture change particularly challenging because everyone is conforming to the current culture. Sometimes though, the problem contains the solution.”

Champions and role-models

• In team-based communities especially (as opposed to shared interest groups), if the leads are not role-models in active participation, then this sends a signal that the community is not important

• Facilitators must lead by example, and encourage senior/respected people to be role-models

- People will follow or respond to their lead and encouragement

Viral Approach

• Concentrate on training a core group

- they will set the good examples and be an influence on others

Push sharing in a pull system

• I had a scenario of a CoP facilitator emailing a link to a few people

- I suggested using the blog otherwise it sends the wrong signal (kind of like a parent telling their kids off for something they do themselves)

- if their intended audience aren’t subscribers of the blog, they can create the blog post, then send them the link

It’s about conversation

• It’s not all about the blog post itself

- it’s about the the conversations that the blog post triggers (this will build community spirit…like a thriving dinner party…you will go to the next one as you enjoyed the company and stimulation of the previous one)

- people are more prone to comment, rather than blog or write a forum topic

- don’t have to be provocative, but even when posting about a journal article, rather than just share the link, write an opinion based review…this will get people to react

Raids/Barnraising

• Similar to handholding and more popular with wikis is spending a session on using a wiki for a specific and real purpose

- this gives people real experience at using them, and using new tools for current needs

- the idea is that they will go back to their seats and continue using it, as they have overcome the technology barrier and the “what can I use this tool for” barrier

- it also builds working collaboratively

- as the ThoughFarmer post points out, it also gives people examples to learn from

- I have a Wiki CoP at work where we blog about wikis and ask questions in forums, it’s also where I list examples of wikis that people are creating (it gives others ideas of how they can use wikis)

- here are some links to barnraising wikis

Re-purposing email (It’s more about new behaviours)

• CoP tools replace the email distribution list

• If people continue using email out of habit, the facilitator must thank them for participating. And then mention that if you are going to email an announcement, news or sharing information, please use a blog. And if you are going to email a question or topic for discussion use a forum.

- then demonstrate by re-posting their email into the forum with your reply, then send them the link

- ask them to subscribe in case the conversation keeps going

• Answer questions promptly so people feel heard and benefit from participating

- this will influence return visits

Hand-holding

• This is about breaking old habits with new technologies, plus people are expected to publish in an open place, rather than the more confident private email channels

- plus they won’t spare the time for themselves to learn a new tool, but they perhaps will if you instigate it

• This may involve sitting down with a member once a week for a couple of months and guide them along in publishing a blog post, until they get used to it and build the confidence.

• Once people get comments and ratings on their blog posts, it gives them confidence and encouragement to continue posting.

- see Nancy Dixon’s post on a company commander who became an active participant after he found out that other people were getting valuable use from his AAR document

- being appreciated and feeling you have made a difference are good conditions for further participation

• After a while this system becomes self-rewarding as people may draw a reputation

For more on this, read the next section on “Feedback”

Feedback (Reputation/Recognition)

NOTE: I will state here that I lean more on the natural and sustainable method of the conversational element in self generating peer reputation to propel the community, rather than incentives.

• I’m finding that when people use CoPs well I am impressed and give them feedback

- this encourages more participation (see the end of the previous section on “Hand-holding”)
eg. good use of blogging

- one facilitator blogged to her members that she has email subscribed all members to the main blog, and took the courtesy to explain how to unsubscribe.

- Just today I emailed a picture of a gold star to a CoP facilitator for really using their blogs and forums well, they have a really active community…and he emailed me back saying “ha ha - I would rather have had a picture of a beer”

- and of course we hope a comments discussion self generates the motivation for more blog posts (HP’s study hold this as one of two highest factors to participation)

Nancy Dixon relates this to recognition:

“Recognition means the most to us when it comes from those who really know the subject – who know what they’re talking about. It’s great to have your boss think you’re a top performer, but chances are your boss doesn’t know enough about the technical part of your work to know how good you really are – but your peers do. For a peer to say, “The person that really understands that problem is Pete,” that comment Pete would regard as a sign of respect and one he would highly value.”

Group building

• Face-to-face interaction and connection, or online ways for members to connect in real-time

• These can be social gatherings, meetings, or workshops

The next section on “Confidence” extends on the impact that building rapport has for knowledge sharing/participation

Trust (Confidence/Comfort)

• Are people confident and comfortable enough to participate? ie. do they have a relationship with other members
eg. at a house party we are always more comfortable in sharing our lives after a lot of small talk where we build a rapport (a certain level of trust)…or after a few drinks

- Karen Stephenson’s article for more.

Relationships (Give and Take)

• Is there an equilibrium of give and take (both with members and non-members)

- do some members just ask questions and never help out with answers

- are members willing to research answers for questions from non-members
(this is an important point, and the reason why most CoPs are membership based, you are willing to take the time to help out others within the membership circle, as they will in turn help you out next time (like the reciprocal altruism of vampire bats)

- People you trust will give you confidence they will not misuse your knowledge sharing

- Are some members being burdened
(again membership is important, as you take the time to help out a handful of people)

Gia Lyons has a great post on this

“Because you are the one individual who knows this stuff, you are reluctant to advertise that fact, for fear of the avalanche of requests to collaborate. You need more emails, IMs, and phone calls like you need another orifice in your cranium. Plus, these people who would swarm you like flies on poo will not perhaps care too much if you are over-extended. But, you are more than happy to share what you know with one or two others, after you’ve discerned that they won’t abuse you, won’t stab you in the back, won’t take credit for your intellectual capital, and will perhaps return the favor. The people who invest in creating a relationship with you are rewarded with your experienced point of view.”

More from Nancy Dixon:

“We do not give that knowledge away lightly. Before we take the time and trouble to share that knowledge, we need some assurance that our knowledge will be treated with the respect it deserves, given thoughtful consideration, and that the recipient actually knows enough to make use of it.”

In order to share knowledge, we need to build relationships, and we do this by informal conversations on sites such as online communities:

“The way a professional can know how someone will treat the precious commodity of her knowledge is to know that person well enough to make that judgment call.”

“…sharing knowledge is risky, the other person may make a cutting remark about it or indicate that it’s not worth listening to. And sharing knowledge is time consuming, because to really respond to another’s question or problem takes the time to understand the issue and to explain in sufficient depth. So we rightly place conditions around sharing our in-depth knowledge. The relationships we build with others provide a needed level of confidence that our knowledge will be treated with respect. Knowledge sharing and relationship are coupled.”

Personal relevancy

• Is the community personally relevant, or fulfilling needs at an individual level?

Dawn Foster lists some motivation factors

Portal

• In addition to being a conversational place, dress the homepage with common links so it becomes a pivot point for peripheral needs

In-the-flow

• Choose an activity or type of communication that is conducted in an email list and now do it in the CoP

eg. broadcast announcements are now done in the CoP blog, people have no choice but it visit the CoP
- while they are there they may look around and participate elsewhere

For more see the Transparent Office blog

Activities

• Offline

- choose something you do offline eg. a question time pre or post a conference/meeting…and complement this with using a forum for pre and post questions

• Member intros

- one of our CoPs makes it mandatory that new members fill in a forum topic where they can tell the group a little about themselves, experience, why they joined, aspirations

• Lounge forum

- some of our younger generation (graduate) CoPs have non-work forums as a way to build commonality, fun and relationships

- the more rapport we build the more we build opportunities to collaborate and help each other out

- Dawn Foster has more on the lounge concept

• Blog carnivals (thematic topic weeks)

• Polls

• Coffee corner/Fill in the gap

- fun quiz, riddle, story…

• Member of the month

- this showcases a member

- one of our graduate CoPs also asks questions to the community about a member
(this gets people talking to each other, and finding things out about each other)

• Showcase hot discussions (weekly roundup posts)

• Share personal stories

• Keep track of people traveling

• Guest posts from other CoPs

• Use engaging media (videos)

• Link to your CoP in your email signature

• Create your own newsletter to reach others

• Promote the CoP in other newsletters

• Write about stuff happening in other communities

• Build a relationship with sister CoPs (drive traffic to each other)

• Guest bloggers from other CoPs

• Rehash old content in other ways

• Events / guest speakers

• Blog columns (frequent posts)

General facilitator duties

The focus of this blog kind of bleeds into some of the duties of a Facilitator, so I’ve included a few below

• Gardening/Weeding (move topics, distill great posts on wikipages)

• Design

• Help and welcome new members

• Assist people in using CoP

• Answer questions promptly

• Make sure content is correct (re-edit old posts, leave a comment to correct/update)

• Help guides

• Remind people which tools to use

• Re-purpose email

• Off topic reminders

• Welcome suggestions and Feedback (via a forum)

• Barnraising

• Monitor/Listen in and always offer pointers or feedback or congratulate

• Understand member motivation

• Encourage members to specialise

• Promotion

Related

Preparing for community release
Self-serve create groups is essential to harness emergence and adapt
I don’t create communities, I create online spaces!
Enterprise social networks and ad-hoc groups

Getting an internal Facebook (social network and group feature) is a standalone tool, it has nothing to do with the Intranet, does it?

Unless you can structure it yourself like Nathan Wallace did with a Confluence wiki…not sure if SocialText can achieve a similar thing, but I believe OpenText Social Media, Lotus Connections, Jive, Awareness, Traction, Telligent, Connectbeam, and more suites made of components rather than designed as an Intranet.

Getting an internal Facebook that is designed as an Intranet replacement is more like Intranet 2.0, and seems to be what ThoughtFarmer are doing.

I suppose the third category would be to alter your existing Intranet by mashing in these types of features.

The latest Neilsen report on the social intranet says a few interesting things on this point:

“It’s important to integrate social features with the main intranet to avoid burdening users with double work.”

“That said, several of our case studies successfully implemented a staged approach, initially separating social features from the main intranet because of their different design and feel. Eventually, these features should be integrated, ideally as part of a bigger project to redesign the entire portal.”

I guess the difference I’m making here is that these new social network/group tools are mainly about connecting and collaborating, whereas Intranets are usually about profile information on each unit, heavily used tools and links, and news from teams to the rest of the organisation.

In this sense it seems designed tools like Thoughfarmer are combing the best of both worlds:

Doing work/finding stuff

• individual connecting with the organisation
• individual sensemaking
• collaborate in groups

Company information, tools and news

• make a profile page for your team with links to lots of info and what you are about…and also news your team wants to share with the organisation
• find common tools and links (timesheets, repositories, etc…)
• a company homepage as the pivot point

This is taking us back to the true meaning of Intranet (via Matthew Hodgson), rather then the hijacked, vetted, static, one-to-many tool it became.

“Essentially, he observed that people were creating small websites inside their organisations to share knowledge and communicate information”

Matthew then explains it’s relationship with early KM efforts:

“…the idea that, much like print publishing, documents are worked on by individuals and then released to others once it is finished and officially approved. KM guru David Gurteen suggests that this “create and publish” behaviour is also likely to be the result of early knowledge management efforts to bring structure to information in the organisation and make it searchable and easily accessible to employees. Unfortunately, as Gurteen highlights, too often employees didn’t see any value in this for themselves and, as a result, such systems failed”

“The essence of this failure of early intranets to bring true communication value into an organisation and to its employees is perhaps bound with the lack of recognition and understanding of how knowledge is created and information is shared by people. It’s also the factor that underpins Web 2.0’s success where traditional intranets have tended to fail. That is, that information is shared through social networks, from person to person, and that there are a number of roles in that social exchange.”

Related

KM: Round 2.0
KM 2.0 is about “showing your workings out”
Is publish a dirty word in enterprise 2.0

The other day when I posted on social networks and ad-hoc groups, I mentioned these online tools need to mirror both our offline behaviour, and our online real-time behaviour.

I set the scenario that at work there may be a task or initiative which involves people from many departments.

What usually happens is everyone gets invited to a meeting: in a room, via a telecon, or something like webex (we now use MS Office Communicator).

After the meeting the coordinator will go back to their seat, document the minutes in MSword and send an email attachment.

Then various people use email to do their bit.

Then we reconvene in a new meeting to see where everyone is at.

This is hopeless; I say when we go back to our seats we can still assimilate the real-time room (meeting) environment in an asynchronous fashion.

This makes for better communication, coordination and awareness…and transparency by default.

After the meeting someone can create a group space and invite all members as quick as sending an email.

Here they will find the minutes in a wiki, each page has a comments stream.

Here they will find a question space (just like issues raised in the meeting)

Here they will find a blog to post updates about the part they are working on.

Well, look at that, we can do asynchronously, what we usually do when we are in the same room.

This online tool is a social network with ad-hoc groups, where you have your own “mypage” that lists all groups you are working in, even better if you can post to any of the groups from your page.

Integration

A good way for adopting new practices is in the design and integration with existing tools.

Just like Jon Mell describes less use of email by incorporating IM into email (placing it in the same spot where you create a new email)…what I would like to see at the end of an Office Communicator Live Meeting, is to be able to spin this real-time (synchronous) ad-hoc group into an asynchronous ad-hoc group using a social network and group tool. Somehow both tools would be integrated, making jumping from one to the other the obvious thing to do; rather than using email for asynchronous communication and coordination.

People often find email conversation frustrating so it’s decided we need another meeting…with the correct asynchronous tools you don’t need so many meetings as we can use blogs to communicate, forums to discuss and wikis to collaborate on a perpetual basis…I alluded to this use case for teams a while back.

BTW-Why is Outlook not an internal Facebook and MS Office Communicator an internal Twitter?

Like my last post, design is key to influencing new behaviours.

More from Jon Mell:

“…there is no reason why at the front end we cannot combine communication tools at the presentation layer so that people don’t have to think as much about how they are going to communicate and which tools they are going to use. There is a scale here in terms of how advanced people are in their adoption and usage of Enterprise 2.0. Once people are comfortable with the concept of Enterprise 2.0 then they will naturally and intuitively know which tools to use without thinking. At the initial adoption stage, however, putting guidance and pointers in the flow of existing tools can have a significant impact in terms of alleviating any fears of using a new system. Some users may always stay in this mode, where they need the system to do the thinking for them in terms of which tools to use, and others may move to a position where the thinking becomes more intuition.”

Paula Thorton is a blogging canon of late, which is good to see as her twitter trigger fingers are always on fire, but don’t provide enough space for her to share her extended original thinking, so I’m happy she’s blog drunk again.

Anyway, a post of hers called Adoption can’t be driven, really rang true to me, it’s about design, adoption and adaptation…the basic premise is that without user centred design, you can forget even trying to faciliate adoption.

In the comments she says:

“Rather than drive, push, pull — movement occurs by mutual attraction: draw (this is a fundamental principle of complexity sciences ala. self organization — per Stuart Kauffman, it’s “energy for free”). But that’s the ‘lesser’ goal. The FIRST goal is to simply GO to where they are. Meet them. While that can be taken literally, it’s more figurative. It’s about figuring out what activity they’re doing and embed function.”

NOTE: I’m currently drafting a post on adoption that goes much further into this, so stay tuned.

I could really relate to Paula’s post to the context of my current experience in using a 90’s non-user centred application for Communities of Practice (CoPs), as I find I’m driving adoption in a “pushing” sense in a big way in relation to the technology/design aspect. User manuals is not a good start, as CoP tools are very simplistic, they are not sophisticated at all…but that’s what you get when the design is not user centred.

Then to really press the point I came across this tweet:

GIA LYONS
RT @cflanagan: Poll: Do you allow employees 2 (self-service) create groups in your intn’l e2.0 deplmnt? http://twtpoll.com/elm0uu #twtpoll

JOHNT
@gialyons after meeting i can go back 2 desk + coordinate by email in 1 click, groups should b same

There is some context missing here that’s make it a little hard for this survey to be totally effective.

And that is, different applications have different ways of setting up groups…some old school apps involve some work in setting up a group…but on second thought this poll alludes to web 2.0 type tools, so I guess that means group features that you can set up in a couple of clicks.

NOTE: In this post I refer to CoPs and groups interchangeably, but as you know a CoP is a type of group.

In a previous post I have explained our CoPs are portal type websites that need to be designed, which means they take a while to set up, and they have lots of permissions functionality, you can add many blogs, forums, wikis, etc…they certainly don’t suit a quick set-up, and aren’t the easiest things to run.

This does not change our belief in emergent communities, but because of design sophistication and the design not being user-centric we have taken a bottom-up request, top-down creation, which is unfortunately a necessary obstacle to emergence.

This means I create the CoPs, and use my HTML skills to design the CoP as user friendly as possible to the needs of the requestors. I do this as they may not have skills or time to design their CoP…I want to limit the design adoption barrier as much as possible.

I really understand Paula’s point, because I believe we would have lots more adoption if the CoPs were designed intuitively, and we allowed self-serve creation.
People want to visit, orient themselves (ie. without thinking, understand what they can and can’t do), and be one-click away from an action.

Self serve creation is key!

The creation of the actual space is really important for emergence and empowerment, and this is what I like about new social computing tools like Lotus Connections, Jive, Open Text Social Media, etc… As a result this is a plus for adoption.

Think about it, a couple of us are interested in a topic or have a task to do…we create a group space in under a minute, and start participating.

The minute people need permissions, is a minute too long; they don’t bother and will use email. And if the design is not user-centric, they may eventually give up leaving a ghost town for email.

What self creation means is you are gonna get less of the prescribed scenario where the boss requests the creation of a CoP and appoints people to be members and lead; as people have the power to self-serve and naturally coalesce around a topic.

I bet that before the boss can even order a CoP, there would be people already creating their own…this is great, as the boss can concentrate on leadership.

Self-serve creation is where it’s at! as the very essence of it is not encouraging a culture of orders and outcome, but instead a culture of, “if it has value it will surface” (emergence and adapting)…plus the bonus of a transparent workplace (kind of like an emergence on top of the emergence)

User-centric design is where it’s at! as people just don’t have time to read a manual, or no longer read manuals anyway…or click around for an hour working it out, and even if they do, it doesn’t make using a non-intuitive tool less frustrating.

Don’t get me wrong, our current CoPs are great as conversational portal like websites, your HTML skills are your only barrier to creating a flashy site. Because of this design, they are prone to be used for more long-term uses.

In contrast, the enterprise version of anyone being able to set up a Facebook or LinkedIn type group in a few easy clicks is marvellous and simple to use…what people think in the organisation is actually making itself present as the frontline workers actually get to create the brains (groups) where this thinking (conversations) happens.
But your group may want more than a glorified forum and activity stream. They may want various forums on the same page, perhaps some permissions control, and a way to flash up the site. I guess the answer to this using 2.0 type groups is create as many groups as you like, and then use a wiki as your website to list them all, and perhaps also re-syndicate the content.

Since our current CoPs allow each CoP to house unlimited forums, blogs and wikis; this means topics may become buried in the CoP as it tries to cater too much. Seeing a CoP name in our directory is certainly not going to be able to describe all the content sources in the CoP. Plus you may have people that hang around a particular forum in the CoP and not the others, and they may want some more ownership and visibility by having their own space.
In contrast some of our existing CoPs would not suit new web 2.0 stream like group spaces (as they seem too simple), they would instead like to provide multiple blogs and forums in the one page, and to create free-form HTML content, this is especially true with some of our CoPs being used as support spaces, as they serve as a conversational portal/knowledge base.

I’ll just add a final comment on behavioural design…I’ve noticed that some of these new group sites don’t use terms like blogs, forums, and wikis, but instead call them messages, questions, documents. Even contextual names for blogs like project diaries, etc… I think using a familiar word like “messages, questions” lessens the unfamiliarity and even the stereotype you may have of the tool, and in all lessens the barrier to take part as it’s nothing too different.

Just like matter warps gravity, design can warp culture.

NOTE: My use of the word “warp” is not referring to the result of good or bad, but instead the intervening cause.

Matt Simpson has a kicker of a post in regards to a scenario that happens to me all the time…which you would expect from someone who deals with enterprise online communities on a daily basis.

The post title says it all, The Manager Who Thought He Could Create a Community.

“I had a meeting today with a manager who thought he could create a community. He was troubled that the community didn’t really work well. It really made him angry.”

“Now, you might ask yourself, how in the world can a man create a community? Aren’t communities made of people? Aren’t they voluntary? Don’t they form when people gather together and interact with one another voluntarily based on something they have in common and actually recognize themselves as members of a persistent group? Yes, of course.

So, I asked the man, how did he do it? He showed me.”

The Manager progressed to create an online space and filled it with member ID’s and appointed someone to facilitate it.

“His major frustration was that the assigned community manager hadn’t taken his role seriously.”

“…we talked a bit about the concept of communities… about voluntary membership and participation… about the self-selecting nature of the membership itself… about the need for leaders to self-select from within the membership and identify their own topics. This is a typical flow of discussion, which, when given enough time and insight, eventually changes a person’s entire outlook… from manager to gardener. Communities form and emerge naturally. They can be encouraged and facilitated; But they can’t be engineered and determined.“

And a magical summary if I’ve ever heard one:

“A man can no more create a community by filling out a form on a webpage than he can make a fruit tree by taping fruit to twigs and twigs to a stump.”

My post, Online communities : Bottom-up requests very much reflects this experience.

Here are some excerpts:

“IF THERE IS a Top-Down *request*, usually by a boss, we inform them that willing a community this way is not effective. Instead you have to workshop with your potential members and from this conversation an appropriate community/s will manifest.”

“Each CoP needs in this order:

1. a substantial enough topic to warrant it’s own space
2. someone who is passionate and has the time to lead it
3. a bunch of members who also have an interest in the topic and will contribute”

“If you have all of these then we will create a CoP as specific as you can (by that I mean a space where people have a shared identity about a topic)
- but I expect each person who wants to lead these CoPs to approach me”

“I noticed some communities in the directory that were created before I was the global lead for the company.
- there was a general community and then another 4 specific communities”

“I rang up the Facilitator of the general community and he told me that he got those 4 specific communities created in the hope to get some people to run them. But it just didn’t happen.”

I also reinforce this point in teams wanting to use CoP tools.

“It’s usually the team lead who wants the community
- so right off the bat we need to know if it’s what the workers want
- and we need to know how to best structure it so the workers naturally participate”

“An idea here for the lead is to put aside control, prescribed structure and convenience of one space, and let the workers suggest community structure/number of communities
- a bottom-up way to structure a top-down request”

“In this approach we get to see if the workers are excited or not (also a good way to surface champions), and they will come up with more natural and usable structures ie. communities designed in a way that will actually be used, as the people on “ground zero” actually designed it to flow with their way of working.”

“Another thing is that if the team lead has appointed a champion, or one has volunteered to facilitate, it’s a very hard job to have influence in a team dynamic.”

Read on for my elaboration on this point.

Something I recommend is to Crowdsource as a way to create a community, and also workshop needs and wants.

My post on spidergrams also lists some questions to address when wanting to create an online space for your community:

“1. Do you have a substantial enough topic that warrants it’s own community?
2. Do you have a community leader with passion and time?
3. Do you have passionate key members?
4. Do you have a shared identity on what you want out of the community? eg. topic, learning
5. Have you workshopped your design, topics, tools, etc…
6. Is it about learning and sharing?
7. Is it about coordinating tasks?
8. Is it about communicating to a general visitor audience? More a communication, and crowdsource tool, than a community?”

My post Social computing is messy and so it should be!, attacks the management approach of prescribed places to participate in.
Often management want all conversations on a topic to be in the one space, but this is unnatural, people will participate where they like to hang out, they don’t want to have to go where they are told to speak about that topic. In the end overlapping conversations happening in different areas is better than forcing and motivating it to happen in one area, and often ending up with no-participation at all.

I said something related to this in my post, More thoughts on community structure and creation:

“It’s not about the topic of the community, it’s about the people.”

Lastly, I mention to managers who want to use our CoP tools for their teams or just regular CoPs that, Communities don’t rely on network effects to be successful

Here are some excerpts from some of our help guides:

“Having an online community website doesn’t make a community, it just enhances the community you already have that you may be administering through email, telecons, face to face.”

If you know of others who are interested in the same topic, but you don’t yet communicate as a community, then workshop with these people to see if they all agree to create an online community space to beget the community.”

“An online space is not enough alone, a community needs members and conversations, otherwise it’s a website, rather than a community.
As a result, someone is required to run the community and encourage participation.”

Something that Matt has bought to my attention that I haven’t made clear is as well as communities (topic and members) naturally emerging, so will the leaders who facilitate the community (self-selecting approach).

[ADDED 18/08/09 Growing a Community is Like Making Risotto:

“A small community can only absorb a small number of new members at a time. Once it is bigger and there are more people that can welcome and absorb new members in a way that acclimates them, recruitment can ramp up. However, if you overwhelm an emergent community you are very likely to have the activity of the community stall out and it will be much harder to get it going again.”

]

Nancy White has a post called Communities, networks and what sits in between, which links to a video with herself and the effervescent Robin Good…I am intrigued by the sweet spot between networks and communities.

I’m not too sure about this middle, or whether it’s to the side…or what…

Is it aggregation?

eg. twitter hash tag channels?

These are not communities, yet people in the network understand to tag their tweets with a conference name so we have a bucket…we are acting like a group, but we are really are not a group at all.

Same goes with a topic news page based on sources that often post about this topic

eg. Nancy and I are part of the Communities and Networks Connection website…our posts are aggregated on the same page, yet we are not a group.

What about “social groupings”?

People that bought this book also bought.
People that also read this book.
People that also use this tag
Even self-organising directories you see on Twitter like wefollow
People in your city that are also vegetarian

Imagine if you could search match the Facebook info page, and do things like “show me people in my network who are also born in 1972″

I made a stupidly long post on this 18 months ago, see Networks, Communities and aggregation

Ad-hoc groups

A wall we are hitting at work is the need for ad-hoc group spaces to work on something rather than using email.

Lots of people belong to CoPs, but when it comes to working on a task with diverse people we get stuck…we could choose to nominate a CoP, but we’d rather an on-the-fly room. I explained this scenario in this post, Communities of Practice and discussions with non-Members

Some questions that come up when thinking about using an existing CoP is:

- whose CoP should we use to do this task
- not sure if people in my CoP will like me inviting temp members
- only people interested in the CoP topic should be members
- the CoP should not be used for unrelated stuff
- this task space would be buried too deep in the CoP , it really deserves it’s own URL so it’s more findable

The issue is that our CoPs are empowering as we can work in a communal space…when we have work to do with another bunch of people we naturally want to use a communal space to do this work, so we resort to our CoP tools as they are our only choice…but as explained a CoP, just like a team, is a shared space for a group of people based around a topic/function…these spaces are not too be abused to do unrelated stuff.

We use OpenText for our CoPs (and for Document Management for that matter), and for the past 3 months have been piloting their new Social Media product (in the realm of Jive, Lotus Connections, SocialText). Similar to the concept of Facebook and LinkedIn, it’s a social network with a groups feature. Our position is that our CoPs tool is more long term, stable, portal like, learning and sharing (looks like a website, with lots of permissions control and unlimited wikis, blogs and forums). Whereas the groups application is more simple/generic, it will be more for ad-hoc tasks/collaboration.

eg. I need to do task A - I need input from someone in marketing, IT, engineering, HR to help me on this task.
In less then 30 seconds I create a group space and invite these members. Here we can talk in a forum, upload documents, and use a wiki. Perhaps after a couple of months the task is finished.

The key is I need to instantly set up a space and communicate and coordinate a task. It’s there to see forever (corporate memory). Managers can actually now see how people do work (which was formerly happening in closed email). Plus the rest of the company can have an ambient awareness of what everyone is doing, leading to more cooperation, and adaptiveness.

This couples with the concept of disintermediation, where senior managers can connect to the raw fragments and workings out of a solution. And of course being able to recombine these fragments in other contexts.

I alluded to this in Twitter the other day:

“In KM 1.0 all we had was the expert song (best practice), in KM 2.0 “we” have all the separate layers to remix the song into new contexts “

Sameer Patel, riffed on it:

“@johnt so true. i was going to use the ingredients vs a complete dish analogy in my last post about ECM & E20″

This is what he referred to:

“When you layer in social computing concepts at the early stages of content creation, you have the ability to encourage such uses of raw ingredients (or social objects). These social objects, previously hidden in an access controlled CMS environment are now unlocked via social computing concepts and tools. The beauty is that they can now be work in progress for some, finished product for others that participate or discover it, or can be interpreted in totally different ways, never intended by the original participants.”

Not to mention the social network part where we can discover (serendipity/opportunities), and connect with a diversity of people…much more alive than the Global Address List (GAL) in Outlook. We can discover each other on social networks, and these relationships can lead to us collaborating on stuff…it just makes sense having social networks and a group module in the same application.

See Cheryl McKinnon’s post, Making Enterprise 2.0 Real. My Story of the “No E-Mail Beta Program”.

This is why I see enterprise products like OpenText Social Media cutting into the use of Outlook. In Outlook we have a GAL and do our group work, however messy and cumbersome it is, now with new tools we can replace the GAL function and the group work function.

Email is private by default, and if all we use is email, then our organisational activity is private by default…same goes with meetings…so at the moment organisational communication and coordination is a slave to inferior technology (non-conducive to the knowledge age).

We have our business units (functional), our teams (execute), our communities of practice (learn)…but what has been lacking online is mirroring the behaviour in how we work offline ie. ad-hoc groups from diverse parts of the organisation assembling in meetings to achieve an objective…and then this is where the mirror should appear, in that we go back to our seats and rather than use email use social networks and group spaces.

Looking at the bigger picture Larry Hawes (riffs off Sameer Patel) posts on how ad-hoc conversational work fits into the ECM picture:

“…social software be used for authoring, sharing, and collecting feedback on draft documents or content chunks before they are formally published and widely distributed. ECM systems may then be used to publish the final, vetted content and manage it throughout the content lifecycle.”

[ADDED 12/08/09: “There is something simply wonderful about a directory of people. And then enabling people to make the directory social. You quickly find not only the people, but who they are, who knows who, and who is paying attention to who. You can surface what people are working on. Groups that exist are made visible, and new groups form easily.” - Ross Mayfield]

Related
Activity-Centric Collaboration: Google Wave and Activities in Lotus Connections

I’ve written in the past of a support team using CoP tools to ask questions (forums), share tips (blogs), list workarounds to processes (wikis)…in all everyone can learn off each other.

Now what about the customer?

Traditional designed Support Database

1. An internal customer of one of our applications eg. a design tool would log a call to the support database.

2. A support person takes the call.

3. All discussion and questions (trouble shooting, investigation) are done via email
- with other support people
- with the customer

4. Other support people don’t go along for the ride in other people’s calls

5. Call is closed and customer problem is solved.

6. Other support people do not benefit from this (as it’s not documented in a public online space)

7. Other customers do not benefit from this (as it’s not documented in a public online space)

Combination of Support Database and an Online space (CoP)

1. An internal customer of one of our applications eg. a design tool would log a call to the support database.

2. A support person takes the call.

3. The discussion happens in the CoP forums where it passes everyone’s radar (as our support database doesn’t have conversations around an item, so we jump to another application and use our CoP forums)

4. Therefore everyone is along for the ride (learning as part of work at no extra effort at all)

5. Call is closed

6. Other support people do benefit from this along the way and also post-call (we may blog about the context of an important call, and even provide a solution in the wiki)

7. Other customers do not benefit from this

Crowdsource the helpdesk

Samuel Driessen has a post called, Crowdsourcing the IT desk, which takes this one step further so both parties can share and learn.

We are web friends and I know he won’t mind so I’ll re-post most of it here:

“What I was wondering is: How many companies are crowdsourcing their IT helpdesks? I see most companies still maintaining traditional helpdesks. So, every employees knows the numbers he/she should call, you call the helpdesk and they try to help you. Usually there’s also a system to support that process. This tool supports the helpdesk to manage calls and their solutions. And employees can check the progress of their incident/question.

However, we all know lots of stuff that is IT helpdesk-ish is solved by asking colleagues for help or Googling the solution. And the solutions the helpdesk provides to one colleagues is shared among the helpdesk people, but is not shared with all employees.

Would it be nice and wise to crowdsource the IT helpdesk. I’m not saying the helpdesk employees should move over. We still need them. But their knowledge and that of all the employees can be used to quickly find who else has a certain problem, to solve issues the IT helpdesk can’t solve, etc.

I’m wondering: does your corporate IT helpdesk work in this way? Or do you know of companies that have this in place? And is this working for them?”

This is how the scenario would work

1. An internal customer of one of our applications eg. a design tool would visit our online support CoP and post a forum topic

2. Anyone in the organisation can visit the forum and see this call (this type of community wouldn’t require members)
- anyone in the organisation can get an RSS or email subscription to this forum

3. The discussion happens in the CoP forums where it passes everyone’s radar (by everyone we don’t just mean the support team, we mean the whole organisation)

4. Therefore everyone (the whole organisation) can choose to go along for the ride (learning as part of work at no extra effort at all)

5. Call may be solved by a non-support person, but it has to be officially closed by a support person.

6. Other support people do benefit from this along the way and also post-call (we may blog about the context of an important call, and even provide a solution in the wiki)

7. Other customers do benefit from this along the way and also post-call (we may blog about the context of an important call, and even provide a solution in the wiki)

Problem now is we have replaced all the sophistication of managing support calls using a designed support database, with a simple forum in a CoP. Now we can crowdsource and re-use information, but we lack workflow tools to manage and report calls.

This is the problem I had with a facilitator with one of our internal CoPs he’s using for support.
I told him these free-form tools are great as they allow you to bend them to do what you want, but you eventually hit a wall as they are not designed to do exactly what you want. You can’t have your cake an eat it to. On the other hand a specifically designed tool will be rigid and only do one thing.

An ideal situation is to go with the crowdsourcing forum concept, where it’s a little more designed towards support flows.

eg. Get Satisfaction, UserVoice and others

I mentioned the business could buy a similar enterprise tool to those above, or they may say we have generic CoPs, please bend them as much as possible to suit your needs, as we can’t buy specific tools for 100’s of departments.

But there’s more…

Another aspect is that there may need to be parallel support spaces.

At work I run Communities of Practice (CoPs) and have a support CoP for Facilitators that run their own CoPs.

When they have an issue they raise a forum topic, if they (or myself) have something to share we use a group blog.

Sometimes a facilitator of a CoP will answer the forum question…yeah, they do my support responsibility for free.

But sometimes we will go back and forth in the forums to clarify the question, and it may get too irrelevant (noisy) for others on the forum.

So we start emailing
- I’d rather another solution where you can splinter off the forum into a private customer side discussion
- this way it’s documented, and I can point other support people to this side discussion, rather than send them a load of emails of my current discussion with the customer

Also, I may need to talk to some other support people in private away from the customer
- rather than email we do this in a private support forum in our Administration CoP
- but again, what would be ideal is to splinter off the forum into a private discussion with my other support people (rather than the two parallel CoP approach)

I just read over on mashable about the various ways to filter tweets; by keywords, by groups, by links, etc…

Under the keyword section they list filttr, but I got to tell you filttr does it all, not as sophisticated as peoplebrowsr, but it has the essential features. It’s oAuth enabled, post select updates to Facebook, Twitpic, file attachments, shortcuts, threaded replies, and has a mobile version. Below I have focused on the filtering features.

Features

• Filters tweets based on your past reading behaviour
• Manually black list and white list keywords
• Slider to curb noisy tweeps

eg. if a tweep is conference tweeting too much you can slide to receive less noise

• Link only tweets from your stream
• Create many keyword streams
• Create many group streams

But can’t share these as Sameer Patel would like, and which some others can do

• Create a combination of a keyword stream within a group, and also, that shows only tweets with links in them

eg. show me tweets with just links in them with the hashtag #e2conf within my group of people I follow called “enterprise”

• Automatically creates a group of tweeps that aren’t in a group

I’ve been using Filttr for most of this year, and I tell ya it helps me deal with my Twitter stream firehose, plus these guys are really responsive with implementing suggested features, either via Twitter, email or Uservoice.

If you have time you can read the regular stream, or perhaps just read link only tweets in the regular stream, but let’s face it I never, ever, ever have time to do this…

I don’t really create keyword search streams unless I’m researching or there is an event, and I haven’t used the sliders or black/white listing features yet.

But what I do use is the grouping feature (alias), and link-only tweets feature.

Just like an RSS Reader I have folder type streams.

These folders are groups that I organise my tweeps in…you can do a keyword search across a group if you like.

eg. I have a group called “enterprise2.0″
- this displays tweets from about 100 people I follow
- if I wanted I could overlay this with a keyword search eg “wiki”
- then later on I can take off the keyword search if I like

For every group, I have a link only group as well.

For example, if I don’t have time to read all tweets in my “enterprise2.0″ group, I’ll read the “enterprise2.0-linkonly” stream instead…this way I can just read tweets that have links in them.

The main groups I have are:

Regular stream-linkonly
Enterprise2.0
Enterprise2.0-linkonly
Enterprise2.0Essentials
Enterprise2.0Essentials-linkonly
Networks
Networks-linkonly
Communities
Communities-linkonly
Learning
Learning-linkonly
KM
KM-linkonly
Local
Local-linkonly
LocalEsssentials
LocalEssentials-linkonly
Vendor
Vendor-linkonly

Today I may only have 20 minutes to catch up on Twitter on my mobile on the train, so I may read:

Communities-linkonly
KM-linkonly
Networks-linkonly
Enterprise2.0Essentials-linkonly

I really like that I’m empowered to be able to do this. With the regular Twitter interface, my 20 minutes would not get me far, or satisfy me…

Twitterslurp - a drop.io API app that creates a keyword Twitter stream, with a list of users and stats for your website, see an example at the Personal Democracy Forum created by the Bivings group.
[ADDED 4/07/09 - Please ignore the Drop.io reference as Twitterslurp by the Bivings Group is based on this googlecode]

Tweetboard - showcase a Twitter stream in your blog. The owner and visitors to your site populate this stream by tweeting in the text box. All replies are threaded. View a history of all tweets or the lastest ones.

Rather than embed this app in your blog, it acts as a tab on the side of the browser window, which you click and a window expands. If this tab is red it means there are new tweets (from the owner and visitors) since your last visit; if it’s green means otherwise.

When someone tweets in the text box provided, the tweet appears at Twitter with a special link called “posted.at” at the end of the tweet. This is a unique link that points back to the site, and opens up that thread…this brings traffic back to your site where the visitors can participate in the thread discussion.
When browsing a sites Tweetboard you can click the permalink of a tweet and it launches a text box where you can copy the permalink of that tweet. You could paste this link into a blog post or a tweet, whatever…I guess this pop-up box spoonfeeds you rather than having to right-click, then copy shortcut.

Further to this, each reply in a tweetboard thread also has a special link called “inreply.to”. When someone clicks the permalink of a reply, a box pops up with the link to that spot in the thread on the tweetboard of that site. If you are reading a reply in the thread and click reply, and enter a tweet, that tweet will appear in twitter with a link back to that exact spot in the thread.

Twitlogo - create and download your own Twitter logo, here’s me.

Dial2Do - a speech to text way to tweet and more, see the others

Tweexchange - see if a user name is available

BONUS
twictionary
My Tweet 16 - view a users first 16 tweets…oh, this doesn’t work as “Twitter only makes a user’s last 3200 tweets available.”

I got a follow-up email the other day from our vendor to see if I have used a new reporting package, and for some feedback. I really don’t have time now as I’m facilitating at the moment, but I will get round to metrics at some stage.

To tell you the truth, this reporting thing is going to be a whole new component to our CoPs, which means I will have to dedicate some good time to learning about it, practicing, and then putting some stuff together to inform CoP facilitators, and then to support them.

I’m so busy at the moment that I keep putting it off. I would be prepared to spend 15 minutes a day on it, but I’m one of those people who once they start, really dive into something; the momentum, continuity and freshness helps me retain and not forget where I’m up to, or how things work again.

Then I thought, blog fragments.

I asked the vendor if she could possibly use her blog to do a weekly post on reporting. Maybe what’s already available, and what’s involved. And then start getting into the new package…perhaps posting once a week to showcase a report and what questions it answers

eg. If your boss is asking for numbers, but you don’t have the time for this stuff just try this quick and easy report on distinct logins, that will buy you time for now.

eg. The boss may ask for penetration metrics eg. The difference in number between members of CoPs and all employess

eg. If your boss wants a more explicit step up, try this report that tells him how many subscribers there are across all blogs and forums

eg. The boss may want some activity metrics eg. the number of blog and forum posts

eg. What about some engagement, try this report on the number of blog/forum posts a month compared to comments/replies. What about the difference between members and contributors, or compare the number of contributors to previous months.

This would really spoon feed me, and help workaround my attitude, and attention scarcity.

There’s no way I’m going to read a paper or dive into a whole new area right now as I’m too busy, but if someone feeds me little fragments where I can learn in bits and pieces, well then I will pay some attention.

Plus I can always comment on the blog posts to get some clarification and context.

Since we are talking about metrics, here’s what Agnes Kolkiewicz emailed me back, I thought it was interesting:

“As I’m sure you know, adoption and success go hand in hand…so I usually encourage the use of metrics not just to measure ROI, but also to measure progress along the way, as then you have data to fall back on at a later date to say this is how the system improved over time. Measuring things along also helps identify “peak times” in participation so that community facilitators can try and perhaps recreate the event that caused the peak at a later date.”

“I’ll post something tomorrow and will aim at a minimum of one post a week.. your email was a good motivation!”

I replied:

“thx Agnes…you are right…kind of like measuring the heartbeat, the rhythm”

Let’s finish off with a quote by Dave Snowden on the theme of this post:

“The basic idea is simple: Small things are more adaptable than big things, and they are frequently more interesting and more able to gain our attention. People will spend more time surfing the Web and using the fragmented material of an RSS feed than reading documents. It’s easier to write a blog than a book. Fine granularity material can combine in novel and different ways more easily than formal documents.”

TweetTabs - multiple Twitter streams on a page, also see ConvoMonitor, TweetGrid, peoplebrowsr, Monittor [via TC]

Twicsy - there are many ways to share images on Twitter, but if you share them using yfog or Twitpic, these are harvested and shown at Twicsy, here are some from the Iranian protests. Twitmatic does the same for video. [via TC]

Twitcaps - same as Twicsy above, it harvests the latest images shared on Twitter

Tweetmic - speech to text tweets for the iPhone, also see vlingo, Twitwoop, TwitterFone, Twitsay, Jott, Spinvox

Tweetree - the alternate interface for Twitter has added a new feature where you can click on links in tweets and view the actual webpage within Tweetree, without opening a new tab or window.

BONUS
SpyMaster
How Twitter’s Staff Uses Twitter (And Why It Could Cause Problems)

FeedVis - Still in private beta, with also an offer of the source code to run it on your server, FeedVis is a a tag cloud generator based on a bunch of feeds that you import via an OPML. The cloud is based on frequency and popularity. This should just be a feature of Google Reader, and probably is in Feedly (also see mini). I remember good old Feeds2.0 had a tag cluster. [via RWW]

embedit.in - embed doc and image files or URLs into your blog posts as flash boxes - doc, docx, xls, xlsx, ppt, pptx, pdf, wpd, odt, ods, odp, png, jpg, gif, tiff, bmp, eps, ai, txt, rtf, csv, html. Limit is 20 meg. If you already have a web page with links to lots of documents, use embedit.in sitewide to convert them in one go. See their tips. I’d rather not embed it in this post, but here’s a URL to an example of embedding a URL. [via nw]

Webinmail - if all you have is an email connection, yet you want to surf the web, then email this service with the URL you want in the subject field, and they will email you back the page…you can even email a search query. [via DI]

Innercircle.cc - create an email distribution list. Also see posterous group blog/email lists

Smub.it - ever read a webpage on your phone and want to bookmark it in delicious, share it on Twitter, Facebook or Friendfeed, email it, etc… I do all the time, but my phone doesn’t have bookmarklets (do phones have these). Anyway, what you can do now is prepend the URL you want to bookmark/share with “smub.it/”. It’s kind of like ShareThis, but done manually by altering the URL.

eg.
- if you came across this URL on your phone
http://www.labnol.org/internet/email/surf-the-web-via-email/5624/

- you go to the address bar, and prepend it with “smub.it/”
smub.it/http://www.labnol.org/internet/email/surf-the-web-via-email/5624/

- then it takes you to a page of icons for delicious, facebook, twitter, friendfeed, email, etc…click on one of these and your away.

Problem with my phone is I can’t choose an icon to click, darn….

Anyway, you can also manage your bookmarks at smub.it, and use a smub bookmarklet or toolbar

It’s also a URL shortener, where you can customise your URL’s
ie enter your ID and a keyword. For example the link in the example above could be
smub.it/johntropea/surfemail

[via BrightHub]