Here is another in a series of session notes for KM World 2010 and Enterprise Search Summit 2010. I attended the session, 10 Principles for Successful CoPs.
This session was led by Stan Garfield, Community Evangelist, Consulting - Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited and Author, Implementing a Successful KM Programme. Stan created the SIKM community that has close to 500 members on a global basis. I have been a member for some time and there are some great discussions. Here is the session description. My notes follow.
“Based on his experience in creating, leading, and managing communities and communities programs, both inside and outside of organizations, Garfield defines and describes 10 principles for successful communities. He offers real-world examples and discusses tools while emphasizing key themes: Communities should be independent of organization structure; they are different from teams; are not sites, blogs or wikis; community leadership and membership should be voluntary; communities span boundaries; need a critical mass of members; start with as broad a scope as is reasonable; need to be actively nurtured; and more.”
Stan said that he was first in a professional community at Washington University School of Medicine in 1975. He was in the role of running community knowledge sharing sessions and there was no technology involved. This was new then. He found that communities work if people share a passion. He has been involved in many communities since then.
Here are the ten principles: One - Communities should be independent of organizational structure. They should be based on the content.
Two – Communities are different from organizations and teams. People are assigned to a team. Communities are better with self–selection for joining and remaining.
Third – Communities are people and not tools. You should not start with tech features. A platform is not a community. Readers of the same blog are not a community but that might be a byproduct.
Fourth – Communities should be voluntary. The passion of members should be what drives a community. You should make the community appealing to get members and not assign them to it.
Fifth – Communities should span boundaries. They should not be for a particular group likes Sales or IT. There is a lot of cross-functional or cross-geography learning that would be missed then. Diverse views help communities.
Sixth – You should minimize redundancy in communities. Consolidation helps to avoid confusion by potential members. It also reduces the possibility of not getting a critical mass. Reducing redundancy also enables more cross-boundary sharing.
Seven - Communities need a critical amass. You need at least 50 and likely 100. Usually ten percent are very active so you can get sufficient level of activity with 100 people.
Eight – Avoid having too narrow of scope for the community. Too much focus can lead to not enough members. Stan advises people to start broad and narrow if necessary. Or start as part of broader community and spin off if needed.
Nine – Communities need to be active. Community leaders need to do work, often in the “spare time” at their regular work. This means that the leader needs a passion for the topics so he or she will spend this extra time. There needs to be energy to get things going.
Ten – Use TARGETs to manage communities. TARGET includes: Types, activities, requirements, goals, expectations, and tools. Each of these issues needs to addressed and explained to prospective members. Tools are necessary, but the least important component, so they are placed last.
I think these are a very useful set of things to consider. Stan covered more useful details faster than I can type. You can get all the details about these ten principles at Stan’s website.
Thanks a lot for all your posts on KMWorld 2010. I just read through them and enjoyed reading them.
Posted by: twitter.com/driessen | December 14, 2010 at 07:39 AM
Samuel - Thanks. Glad they were helpful. Bill
Posted by: bill Ives | December 14, 2010 at 08:32 AM