Hi Phil,

I think I tend to agree with you on your tentative conclusions. As
long as the communities are seen as only needing to benefit the
existing members on a voluntary basis, I think the self organization
and free flow model is perfect, but when a larger organization is
looking to get some real, tangible benefit from the communities,
this approach no longer holds water.

Some on this list may disagree with me on this, but I truly believe
there is a cost associated with gaining organizational benefit from
CoPs. My own experience deals with setting these up within the US
Defense Acquisition Workforce. The goal was to connect all the
folks within a funtional area (all the risk managers from accross
the services, for instance). More importantly, the goal was to
develop a resource base that could be used by the newer folks coming
in to this environment after all the baby boomers retire.

This doesn't just "happen". It must be cultivated and nurtured.
There is a real cost to doing this that must be born. In our case,
we had a group of folks in charge of the overall site that managed
multiple communities, and then had focus area teams working the
individual communities. Each focus area team was made up of a
community facilitator/leader type, a community builder, an
instructional designer and a well respected subject matter expert.
In looking back to do large scale communities in which content
development and sharing is a major portion, I think you need at
least three people per community to really make this "hum."

The other point I'd like to make is that communities are really very
different from individual projects or organizations. Projects, for
instance, have clear lines of authority, deadlines, planned vs
actuals, etc. They have start dates and end dates and clear markers
of success or failure. The skills, attributes and tools you need to
get large scale projects to share information is different than it
is in getting functionally oriented communities to do this.
Undertaking work culture transformation to move an organization from
an information hoarding environment to an information sharing one
may take all aspects of human performance technology to succeed.
Communities are just a part of this.

However, Projects can take advantage of communities in the sense
that their individual members (all the risk managers, for instance)
should be able to perform better if they are linked with a CP.

--- In com-prac@yahoogroups.com, "Phil Klein" <phil@p...> wrote:
...
> is "How do CPs effectively generate & relate to task forces and
work groups?
> Perhaps the CP's k-sharing is at a point that requires coordinated
action to
> address it's central challenge and which is necessary to generate
> more/better k to share?"
> How do you determine when the time is ripe for work project
generation? One thing I've noticed is that it seems many work
projects generated by CPs seem to stall in a state of early
formation and sometimes don't get any traction in the world.
>
> I would love to hear of success stories, resources or best
practices.