Walter Logeman: Journal
Design for Community: About [dead Tuesday, 9 March, 2010]
Welcome to Design for Community! “If you’re not sure what it is you’re looking at, here’s the basic idea: Design for Community is a book, an attitude, and, hopefully, a community.”
Design for Community by Derek Powazek
There is also a useful weblog to link to from here.
The Road to Natural Digital Collaboration
By Elliott Masie, The MASIE Center
Just as there is a process of Instructional Design for developing instructional experiences, we believe that there is a parallel process of Collaborative Design to create the best uses of digital collaboration technology. We need to learn how to assess the needs of the groups involved and select media that is appropriate to the outcome objectives. And, we envision the development of collaboration templates that will embody a design for ideal use of tools in a given situation (e.g. A template that walks the group through a highly interactive video conference for an employment interview, including application sharing of resume and job description documents.)
Finally, there are new roles that we must invent and perfect to make Digital Collaboration really soar. Facilitators, community builders, virtual coaches and other roles will evolve that will make Digital Collaboration work effectively and naturally.
This is a great time to start the experimentation process. We should find teams within our organizations to lead pilots for leveraging existing and new technologies for effective collaboration. It would be great if the “owners” of collaboration technology were not techies but rather process-oriented folks in the HR, Training or Business areas.
Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier
by Etienne C. Wenger and William M. Snyder
Note: Tuesday, March 2, 2010 – That link does not work but I just downloaded this: http://www.stevens.edu/cce/NEW/PDFs/commprac.pdf
A new organizational form is emerging in companies that run on knowledge: the community of practice. And for this expanding universe of companies, communities of practice promise to radically galvanize knowledge sharing, learning, and change.
A community of practice is a group of people informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise. People in companies form them for a variety of reasons — to maintain connections with peers when the company reorganizes; to respond to external changes such as the rise of e-commerce; or to meet new challenges when the company changes strategy.
Regardless of the circumstances that give rise to communities of practice, their members inevitably share knowledge in free-flowing, creative ways that foster new approaches to problems. Over the past five years, the authors have seen communities of practice improve performance at companies as diverse as an international bank, a major car manufacturer, and a U.S. government agency. Communities of practice can drive strategy, generate new lines of business, solve problems, promote the spread of best practices, develop people’s skills, and help companies recruit and retain talent.
The paradox of such communities is that although they are self-organizing and thus resistant to supervision …”