Communities, unlike teams and other structures, need to invite the interaction that makes them alive. Even though communities are voluntary and organic, good community design can invite, even evoke, aliveness.
Designing for aliveness requires a different set of design principles. The goal of community design is to bring out the community’s own internal direction, character, and energy. The principles we developed to do this focus on the dilemmas at the heart of designing communities of practice.
Design for evolution.
Because communities of practice are organic, designing them is more a matter of shepherding their evolution than creating them from scratch. Design elements should be catalysts for a community’s natural evolution. As they develop, communities usually build on preexisting personal networks.
The dynamic nature of communities is vital to their evolution. As the community grows, new members bring new interests and may pull the focus of the community in different directions. Changes in the organization influence the relative importance of the community and place new demands on it. Changes in the core science or technology of a community constantly reshape it, often bringing in professionals from neighboring disciplines, or introducing technological advances that change their way of working. Communities are built on existing networks. They evolve beyond any particular design. The purpose of a design is not to impose a structure but to help the community develop.
Community design is much more like life-long learning than traditional organization design. “Alive” communities reflect on and redesign elements of themselves throughout their existence. Community design often involves fewer elements at the beginning than does a traditional organization design. The first goal was to draw potential members to the community. Once people were engaged in the topic and had begun to build relationships, the core members began introducing other elements of community structure—such as a Web site, links to other communities, projects to define key practices—one at a time.
The key to designing for evolution is to combine design elements in a way that catalyzes community development. However, evolution is common to all communities, and the primary role of design is to catalyze that evolution.
Open a dialogue between inside and outside perspectives.
Good community design requires an insider’s perspective to lead the discovery of details of the community. However, effective community design is built on the collective experience of community members. Only an insider can appreciate the issues at the heart of the domain, the knowledge that is important to share, the challenges their field faces, and the latent potential in emerging ideas and techniques. Good community design requires an understanding of the community’s potential to develop and steward knowledge, but it often takes an outside perspective to help members see the possibilities. . Good community design brings information from outside the community into the dialogue about what the community could achieve.
Invite different levels of participation.
Good community architecture invites many different levels of participation. Alive communities, whether planned or spontaneous, have a coordinator who organizes events and connects community. However, others in the community also take on leadership roles. We commonly see three main levels of community participation. The first is a small core group of people who actively participate in discussions, even debates, in the public community forum. . As the community matures, this core group takes on much of the community’s leadership, its members becoming auxiliaries to the community coordinator. However, this group is usually rather small, only 10 to 15 percent of the whole community. At the next level outside this core is the active group. A large portion of community members are peripheral and rarely participate. Instead, they keep to the sidelines, watching the interaction of the core and active members. Finally, outside these three main levels are people surrounding the community who are not members but who have an interest in the community, including customers, suppliers, and intellectual neighbors. Community members move through these levels. Because the boundaries of a community are fluid, even those outside the community can become quite involved for a time, as the focus of the community shifts to their areas of interest and expertise. The key to good community participation and a healthy degree of movement between levels is to design community activities that allow participants at all levels to feel like full members. Rather than force participation, successful communities “build benches” for those on the sidelines. They make opportunities for semiprivate interaction, whether through private discussion rooms on the community’s Web site, at a community event, or in a one-on-one conversation. This keeps the peripheral members connected. At the same time, communities create opportunities for active members to take limited leadership roles, such as leading a development project that requires a minimal time commitment. In order to draw members into active participation, successful communities build a fire in the center of the community that will draw people to its heat.
Develop both public and private community spaces.
A community coordinator needs to work the private space between meetings, dropping in on community members to discuss their current technical problems and linking them with helpful resources, inside or outside the community. These informal, back channel discussions actually help orchestrate the public space and are required to successful meetings. They ensure that the spontaneous topics raised at the meetings are valuable to the whole and that the people attending will have something useful to add. The one-on-one networking creates a conduit for sharing information with a more limited number of people, using the coordinator’s discretion as a gate. Every phone call, e-mail exchange, or problem-solving conversation strengthens the relationships within the community. The public and private dimensions of a community are interrelated. The key to designing community spaces is to orchestrate activities in both public and private spaces that use the strength of individual relationships to enrich events and use events to strengthen individual relationships.
Focus on value.
Communities thrive because they deliver value to the organization, to the teams on which community members serve, and to the community members themselves. Value is key to community life, because participation in most communities is voluntary. the community grows, developing a systematic body of knowledge that can be easily accessed becomes more important.
Rather than attempting to determine their expected value in advance, communities need to create events, activities, and relationships that help their potential value emerge and enable them to discover new ways to harvest it. In fact, a key element of designing for value is to encourage community members to be explicit about the value of the community throughout its lifetime.
Combine familiarity and excitement.
Communities of practice are what Ray Oldenberg calls “neutral places,” separate from the everyday work pressures of people’s jobs. Unlike team members, community members can offer advice on a project with no risk of being entangled in it; they can listen to advice with no obligation to take it. Like a well-planned, challenging conference, vibrant communities also supply divergent thinking and activity. Conferences, fairs, and workshops such as these bring the community together in a special way and thus facilitate a different kind of spontaneous contact between people. They can provide novelty and excitement that complements the familiarity of everyday activities.
Lively communities combine both familiar and exciting events so community members can develop the relationships they need to be well connected as well as generate the excitement they need to be fully engaged. Routine activities provide the stability for relationship-building connections; exciting events provide a sense of common adventure.
Create a rhythm for the community.Vibrant communities of practice also have a rhythm. At the heart of a community is a web of enduring relationships among members, but the tempo of their interactions is greatly influenced by the rhythm of community events. Regular meetings, teleconferences, Web site activity, and informal lunches ebb and flow along with the heartbeat of the community. When that beat is strong and rhythmic, the community has a sense of movement and liveliness. If the beat is too fast, the community feels breathless; people stop participating because they are overwhelmed. When the beat is too slow, the community feels sluggish. Sometimes key projects and special events create milestones for the community, breaking up the regular rhythm. The rhythm of the community is the strongest indicator of its aliveness. There are many rhythms in a community—the syncopation of familiar and exciting events, the frequency of private interactions, the ebb and flow of people from the sidelines into active participation, and the pace of the community’s overall evolution. A combination of whole-community and small-group gatherings creates a balance between the thrill of exposure to many different ideas and the comfort of more intimate relationships. A mix of idea-sharing forums and tool-building projects fosters both casual connections and directed community action. There is no right beat for all communities, and the beat is likely to change as the community evolves. However, finding the right rhythm at each stage is required for community’s development.
Written by jagadesh
