A while back the PBS Frontline series ran a special entitled Digital Natives.  If, like me, you missed it you can view the program streamed off their web site.  And it is well worth the time.  It starts out sort of feeling like a standard case of adult worrying that the new generation is somehow headed to ruin because they don’t appreciate the values adults consider important.  But the program is more than that, so stick it out through the end.

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We humans are social animals, and naturally come together to share information.  Workplaces are full of these type of groups, from informal groups meeting at the water cooler, to more formal meetings with regular speakers.  And while there is value in these interactions, the efforts can suffer from their informal nature.  In Cultivating Communities of Practice the authors lay out a series of methods to foster intentional knowledge strategies through formal management and creation of these groups.  With the goal of fostering and environment that is rewarding for employees while also generating value for the company.

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If you’re a frequent participant in online professional networking communities these points should hopefully be obvious.  But online communities start to become more widely used in workplace settings, and more newbies come into the mix, reminders to play nice are never out of place.

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I am leading an effort at our university to create a community resource site to support the work of our distributed web developers.  Our school has the fairly typical situation where individual or small groups (2 or 3) handle web design/programming work for departments, centers and other units.  They work with a high level of autonomy, serving the needs of their department with little coordination with any centralized resource.  Over the last couple of years a growing group has joined an informal web developers round table, meeting periodically in forums where people showcase their latest projects, and use those as jumping off points for the group to share ideas, lessons learned and other knowledge.

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RedHat has started an on-line book on creating open source communities.  Much of the focus so far seems directed towards open source software projects, but there is plenty of relevance to a broader notion of open communities.  I like the description of communities of practice as “groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.” This is exactly the type of energy I’m hoping we can harness in our workplace.

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While I’m on summertime travel please enjoy this re-post from the Rodeworks archive.  Magnatune continues to be a significant presence in online music distribution, and proof that open access, free delivery and pay-what-you-will can be a successful business model. Read the rest of this entry »