 |
 |
|
 |
     |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Background: Online knowledge sharing communities, sometimes referred to as communities of practice (CoPs) can only succeed if they are successful at cultivating interaction over time. This is especially true for large scale knowledge sharing communities whose members are geographically dispersed to the point that face-to-face meetings among the majority of the members is no longer possible. A lot of the advice on building communities of practice centers around effective planning and startup, setting the community goals, and so forth. This article posits that the most important success criteria for online knowledge sharing communities is in cultivating interaction- if this is successful, all other aspects of community building become infinitely easier. Effective community interaction must manifest itself in a number of different ways to cultivate a robust community (ie - a discussion page alone does not make a community)..
While this paper is useful for small scale communities, it is primarily geared towards large scale communities of practice which have potentially over 100 active members with many many more lurkers. Additionally, this paper is written with the assumption that there is some level of support team (voluntary or paid) provided for supporting the large scale community.
Section 1 - Community Interaction:
This section will define community interaction, describe its relevance to communities,
and will describe the types of community interaction relevant both to the CoP
support team personnel and to those engaged in requirements fulfillment activities.
What is community interaction? Community interaction refers to the level of participation within a community of practice, either with other members or with the site itself. Community interaction can occur online or offline. Offline community interaction can occur in face-to-face community meetings, symposiums, phone calls, usability and requirements sessions, etc. The role of a community support team is to foster and grow that interaction through any possible means. To be useful the community interaction obviously needs to be related to the purpose of why the community was formed in the first place.
Why is community interaction important? Community interaction is the measure of the health of a community. Without interaction, there is only point-to-point behavior occurring, in which participants go to a site, get information and leave, without any trace of their interaction recorded. Community interaction is necessary for knowledge sharing and creation. Over time, the goal is often for something special to be created as a product of the interaction or the easy exchange of expertise that would not otherwise be possible. The community's goals can only occur if there is robust community interaction.
How should an emphasis on community interaction affect community building efforts? While support teams may have people devoted to enhancing personal relationships, creating useful content and structuring things in a way that aids the community in getting information, community support teams teams supporting CoP development are not usually driven in a metrics sense to continually increasing community interaction. To create increased performance across an organization or larger group, we must realize that our engine for performance improvement is community interaction. If successful, this dramatically extends the support team's capabilities and ROI exponentially. In effect, with the robust interaction the community itself becomes extended support team personnel, who do everything from build content to recruit new and valuable members. This refinement in focus has clear implications to support CoP success, including community build actions, content development and site development activities, to management oversight.
Types of Community Interaction: There are a number of types of community interaction. Each has implications from a community and site development perspective.
Between community members: The heart of community interaction involves community members interacting with other community members. Relationships are formed, and assistance is provided. This occurs through:
Between a community member and the support team: Community members contact support team members that they have established relationships with or that they can find online. Often the support team personnel turn into the intermediaries to connect community members with one another. These interactions can occur through the following means:
Between a community member and the site: Community interaction that occurs between the community member and the site is a place rich for improvement in most CoPs. This type of interaction basically has the online site becoming the intermediary to connect community members. This has high ROI if it can be designed in a way that fosters spontaneous interaction from community members. This also should follow an ever increasing trend, in which previous community member/site interactions spawn additional actions. These can occur via:
Automated Connections that shows footprints of other’s presence: In this instance, there is more information provided to the community member that gives them a sense of what other community members are doing. This includes things like:
Between an external organization and the online community site: In this instance, a CoP may develop sets of relationships with other organizations that imply a sense of interaction. This could be supplyers, consortiums, supporting government offices, content providers, etc. Examples of this include:
Aid in improving the content: A key part of the participation involves the community improving the content provided. This is done in a number of ways:
Aid in improving the interface: Both in up front needs analysis and as community members begin to take ownership of the site, the community members should be participating in designing and improving the site. This is accomplished through:
Section 2: How Do We Foster Community Interaction? The above section describes a notional breakdown of community interaction; Section two provides the approach taken for fostering community interaction. The approach advocated for cultivating interaction is best described as a three step process: Entice, Excite and Engage. Each step is essential in getting a large body of people to want to participate in a voluntary community.
Entice target members into joining: The first step in fostering community interaction among potential members is one of enticement. The community support team needs to create a motivating reason for target members to want to participate. Through a number of different methods, the support team must reach out to target members to get them to join.
Excite members into wanting to participate: Even though a person may join a community, this is still a small commitment on their part. The majority of “enticed” members who have registered are in the “still to be excited” phase in the community interaction scale. Most community members never participate, but simply "lurk" on the site to get their needs met. While this is perfectly acceptable, it does not aid in fostering community interaction, the engine of performance improvement. New members must become interested enough in what the community is all about that they actually envision themselves participating in the community interaction.
The Excite process involves dovetailing the community members needs and interests with what is occurring within the community. The goal is to motivate participation by convincing the new member that the their needs and interests can be met based on participation in the community. In some cases, we find that members, who were once even engaged, drop down in their level of interest. The excite process in ongoing, and is necessary to maintain interest over time. Many options are available, including:
Engage members in participation: This is the final step, in which the members become active in the community. This implies a commitment on their part to aid in the community building process. Engagement is required for membership in the core community listing. Engagement can take on many forms, including:
Section 3: How Do We Support the Entice, Excite, Engage Process? There are many different mechanisms required to support the entice, excite, engage process for community building. These have already been addressed by our team, so they will only be mentioned briefly.
Member tracking and relationship system: The member tracking system is necessary for guiding community interaction efforts. This allows multi support personnel to interact with community members from across the site. Detailed use of this allows more targeted use of member - support personnel interaction.
Methods to determine community needs: Within each community, through a number of different means, it is necessary to determine the community member needs. These may run the gamut from basic information to detailed discussions of problems. Each community may be different.
Methods to determine structure to support multiple communities: We have multiple communities to support. There are a lot of shared aspects to the site that, if poorly designed, lead to community interaction problems. A number of areas relate to this, including:
Methods to determine how to structure and integrate the content: The content in the community section should be structured for optimum performance support and community collaboration. Both are essential for community growth. At a minimum, there are three types of knowledge that needs structuring:
The structuring and organization of this knowledge is done using the following methods:
Requirements fulfillment team: There are a number of requirements that arise in the building of communities. A requirements fulfillment team is key to making these a reality. This team will have a number of skill sets geared towards fulfillment of the requirements. Many options exist for meeting the requirements, including:
Content Management System: Through both well thought out, agreed upon processes and automated tools, the support team can manage the site wide content over time. It is important for the content management system to not be overly burdensome. If it becomes too difficult for the community members to make contributions and act on the content, there will be no interaction.
Robust Search capability: The community site needs a robust search capabiltiy to allow both active participants, lurkers and external users to be able to find useful content content quickly.