Difference between revisions of "Talk:CTLab:Community"

Revision as of 10:44, 20 July 2012

Nancy 2012/07/03

I had a slightly different take on this because this month I am co-moderator for both the KM4Dev DGroup and NING site. What amazes me is the join rate on NING is at least 20 times more than the DGroups, yet we don't do much to steward community activities on NING. It just IS. So this raises a lot of interesting question for me about what "joining" means.

Does joining simply imply subscription to a technology that facilitates sending/receiving information, or am I "joining" a community? Do I understand anything about that community? Does it matter?

Daan 2012/07/03

Think there may be fifty shades of grey on joining a community. Joining can have different purposes, meanings and I'm convinced that a topic can create a stir on responses, professional level as well. Technology can play a role but less I think that sense of belonging, respect, quality and peers. I also think that if a network becomes to large you lose interest.

Jaap 2012/07/03

"Professionally" I follow / manage closely the KM4Dev Ning (almost 2750) and MyWASH (plus 600) and follow the KM4Dev list daily.

I notice new member (all new members are moderated) bubbles. Sometimes two / three with similar context. Sometimes after Ewen facilitated another Ethiopia gig :-) It is true! I reckon all KM4Dev-ers - and for sure the 200+ or so core (see SNA debate) - spread the word by mouth :-) ShareFairs help too, certainly at big organisations like FAO / IFAD.

As for Daan's size; yes too big / too shallow is a de-incentive, so we should as you suggest let the network emerge regional groups.

Next week I will be in Ouagadougou and try to connect to SaGe (the French KM4Dev connection). Within KM4Dev the number of groups is increasing but could use more local learning.

I would like to stir-up the idea to sponsor KM4Dev presence at Southern KM-ish gatherings. The membership fee as mentioned might source such. Aim should be to interest (new) KM4Dev-ers to co-moderate.

Peter 2012/07/05

Nancy you touch a point I tried to raise even before our Rome meeting. KM4Dev is for many people not necessarily a community, but rather a service. Which is exactly what we are about: it is fantastic! Now of course the service is staying afloat thanks to a community with an inner core. So maybe it is time to distinguish between KM4Dev as:

1. a service
2. a community
3. a core

?

Daan 2012/07/05

Agree, more labels can be added such as member or associate, perhaps even apprentice. Being part of the community can have various roles at different stages and times of your development. It's good though to think through this process and link this item to Jasmin's earlier request on the way forward and differentiation.

Charles 2012/07/05

I see KM4Dev as a hybrid with all the three (service, community & core) overlapping layers. One layer without the others may be meaningless.

Nancy 2012/07/05

From both a community technology stewardship and community leader perspective, this becomes a pretty complex system.

So my questions are:

1. At what scale does this hybrid work and/or fall apart without intensive support

2. What do we lose at scale? What do we lose when things are small

I think technology has had a profound effect on communities, enabling them to grow. But supporting larger communities -- and wider networks, requires some potentially different thinking.

For example, "service" implies that someone is providing service to others. Who "pays" for that?

Peter knows I'm strongly resistant to the "service" model because I think it corrupts the community model. I'm not sure they easily co-exist and still support strong member action, leadership and engagement. I think service tips us to "consuming" vs. learning/producing together.

So you see, I worry a lot...

N

Riff 2012/07/06

Various aspects of community/participation are challenging me these days, including my own participation in dialogues that are meaningful to me, but time is severely limited :-)

I often work with people whose reality is very much focused on project implementation in rural/remote contexts in various countries around the world. I suspect they spend A LOT less time in online fora or websites than many colleagues and friends who are based in cities, especially those in Europe or North America. I think there is a large (perhaps still growing) gap between those who spend a large amount of their time doing online things and those who spend a large amount of their time travelling between places, talking to people in meetings where there is no connectivity, etc.

My feeling is proliferation of discussion fora drives participation down even more for those who are less ‘connected’ than for those who are more so. I wonder if in development contexts we can find ways to bridge this gap and/or to help those in less connected contexts make good decisions about which things to follow. It is not a case of low bandwidth or lack of access as much as it is the necessity to spend relatively large amounts of time offline.

To me, this suggests that such people would be much more selective about engagement in communities. Maybe this means a stronger role for people playing a linking role between communities. I know there are technology solutions that can help people track multiple sources of information, and maybe that’s another way to support engagement, but I suppose it is mostly not about technology stewardship….

Neil 2012/07/07

I agree. Also, for those with limited time and poor connectivity, it is especially important to be able to identify the right community for them quickly and easily - a community that meets their needs and which, once they are a member, has a maximal signal-to-noise ratio (for them). Using the word 'community' here, I refer especially to CoPs / discussion forums that are open and inclusive to all with an interest in the scope of the forum.

What more can be done to make it easier for users to find the community that is right for them, quickly and easily?

With the current explosion in new communities of practice, it seems to me that there is a risk that things could become increasingly fragmented and confusing to users (and indeed, everyone) unless steps are taken to facilitate navigation and understanding of the CoP "ecosystem". And that, in turn, could constrain the individual and collective impact of CoPs on international development.

Mark 2012/07/12

From our introduction messages and subsequent discussion it is clear that we support a diversity of CoPs ... from relatively closed groups of 20 people to completely open groups with hundreds or thousands of participants and an “outreach” aspect to their agenda. The question of “what is our community?” is an important one for technology stewards, and these perspectives I hope help us to better understand our own communities so that we can better anticipate and respond to their needs.

Within this discussion we probably don’t need to agree on exactly what is a community because each of our communities serves a different purpose ... but do the members of a community need a common understanding of the nature of the community to which they belong? As a technology steward, how do you anticipate and respond to needs which are diverse and diffuse? As members of the communities that we serve, we are also stakeholders so these conversations can be difficult for us. I would be very interested to see examples of how other communities have addressed these challenges.