RSS feedsSome years ago, 'virtual communities' meant forums and chat; nowadays, think peer-to-peer computing, blogging, communities of practice (CoPs), and collaborative workflow.
Traditional knowledge management (KM) is dead, according to Greg Searle, a speaker who illustrated the 'best practices' of Etienne Wenger, a founder of the CoP movement.
Searle reckons that a top-down bureaucratic approach does not work, whereas bottom-up, 'guerrilla knowledge management' does.
David Snowden of IBM, however, debunked most of Wenger's conventional wisdom. IBM finds that narrative databases are cheaper and faster to build than KM systems and they encourage serendipitous enquiry.
People avoid admitting failure but will happily share stories of failure. Snowden has given his staff a computer game to capture anecdotes of such 'worst practices'.
(After this, Hugh Look, who has chaired this meeting since its inception, brought along his teddy bear, so Teddy could take the blame for timing the speakers.)
You can become psychologically addicted to email. Once you add collaboration, and blogging, and team rooms, you can spend four hours a day collaborating.
Snowden believes that, for trust to exist, the optimum size of a team room is under 15 people. Many communities of 15, and few groups of 150, are the recipe for success; above that bureaucracy begins. A decisive reason for a community is needed, or conversation is 'dumbed down'.
Benefits were obvious to many speakers. CoPs tap into the informal knowledge that falls outside formal hierarchies and documentation.
They pool individual resources, act as an institutional memory, preserve best practices and knowledge artefacts for reuse, reduce the learning curve, recycle intellectual capital, increase innovation, and facilitate fast response.
Information is stored only once and managed centrally. Everything is searchable. Comments and discussion are shown with the associated documents. Overall, there should be fewer meetings, less email, and less duplication of effort, while no special training is required.
Dawn Yankeelov showed how healthcare players have been latecomers to business use of the internet but have begun to catch up over the last three years. She named Health on the Internet Foundation as a standard.
Ian Bilsborough described learning networks at the Countryside Agency. Tactics used for engaging members were: withdrawing other distribution of materials, posting new content regularly, stimulating debate through comments and forums, and ensuring member control over automatic alerting.
In building a sustainable ecological community in a remote real community in Australia, Mark Brogan demonstrated that a vertical market portal, a relic of the dotcom era, could be reinvented as an industry hub.
Wireless integration was a key facility: young people are sold on Short Messaging Service (SMS) and weblogs.
The conference audience was not so keen. Almost everyone had used blogs but few had experience of corporate ones, or so Erik van Bekkum, of the European Collaborative for CoPs, discovered in a conversation with the audience concerning his blog on contribution of CoPs to radical innovation.
One attendee spoke out strongly against corporate blogging: it doesn't change the environment of a company.
PR has certainly changed now that personal broadcasting allows individuals to compete with government and corporate media, said Ali Hossaini. PR must adapt to peer-to-peer and peer-to-many communications. Sponsors of branding communities should be open to dialogue and public criticism.
Their sites should contain a strong element of customer service, and offer tools, entertainment or rewards. Enterprise software company SAP has implemented such a site.
Alexander Hagmeister talked about its community reward programme, which is designed to improve the company image, keep customers informed, and encourage participation.
Points, redeemable in the SAP shop, are awarded for registration, logging in, posting a message, and participation in surveys. The programme is much used and there have been surprisingly few superficial postings.
SAP was one of five sites used by Hannelore Grams to illustrate how to identify and study the high value customer. He concluded that an online community is sustainable provided there are clear goals for establishing it and critical mass in the target group can be achieved.
Martin White outlined features of blogs, 'wikis', content management, discussion lists, email, instant messaging, intranets, knowledge portals, telephone communication, video conferencing, and virtual meeting applications.
'Wiki wiki' is Hawaiian for 'quick', he revealed. A wiki is a collaboration tool; a website where the pages can be changed and instantly published using only a web browser. No programming is required. Pages are automatically created and linked to each other.
In another technological paper, Miranda Mowbray of Hewlett Packard predicted the future of the grid as "a parallel and distributed system that enables the sharing, selection, and aggregation of geographically distributed 'autonomous' resources dynamically at runtime, depending on their availability, capability, cost, etc". See www.gridcomputing.com.
Because of security and billing problems, grid technology is currently used only within companies, by scientific institutions, for outsourcing contracts, and by geeks. Later, it will be used for inter-company collaborations and, non-commercially, by virtual communities.
Much later still, there will be general commercial trading of resources over just one global marketplace grid. There will be considerable downward pressure on the price of standard resources, and current vendors will lose the advantages of brand, bundling, lock-in, distribution and marketing.
Winners will be the providers of grid applications, middle income countries (perhaps), the 'owner' of the marketplace grid, application users, arbitrageurs, and virtual communities.
Some research projects were also described. Hazel Hall of Napier University has studied knowledge sharing motivation in an e-group of code-breakers.
Interestingly, social support continued even after the prize had been won. Lessons learned could be applied to commercial communities, where there may be greater scope for rewarding knowledge sharing than there is in a recreational group.
In business communities, trust matters because money is involved and the aim is to do business. Business people have difficulty in trusting any new community service. Ian Jindal reported interim results from an ICP research project on possible "badges of trust" for site owners.
Lizzie Jackson of the BBC also talked of trust and reputation. Messages in an online community leave a 'snail-trail' of social information. Jackson discussed the factors that enhance or diminish your digital reputation.
Although fraud and identity theft are still rife in the US, the news is not all bad: people are increasingly buying, swapping and interacting on the internet and on mobiles, and profits are up for some of the big sites which combine reputation systems with e-commerce, an optimistic note on which to end this report.
The conference moves to The Hague next year; attendance is recommended.
Dr Wendy Warr is principal consultant at Wendy Warr & Associates.
Websites:
Conference website (with slides)
infonortics.com/vc/index.html
Etienne Wenger's home page
www.ewenger.com
Global Grid Forum
www.gridforum.org
Health on the Internet Foundation
www.hon.ch
ECCOP blog
www.eccop.com/blogs/public
Sources of Information on CoPs
www.intranetfocus.com/intranets/communities.html
