Communties are central for everyone who want to improve his organization : because it’s a performance lever, because it’s an integration factor, because it improves the use of informal knowledge and networls. It’s far from being a fad : even top managers such as Louis Schweitzer assume it.
The community nature of web 2.0 is praised and many try to implement it within the organization, conscious of what it brough to the general public.
So everybody want to build communities but importing the concept within companies appears to be harder than it seems. Sometimes it doesn’t work at all without consideration to the energy spent.
But, is building communities the right goal ?
Communties of practices are an omnipresent subject.
How can we explain that people whose interest is to exchange, share, benchmark, don’t do it although the benefit is obvious for them and, at the same time, for the organization.
Perhaps because the community are interesting proportionnaly to their member’s level of expertise, and there’s an old myth that want people to think expertise is something that has to be kept, not shared. Perharps it’s because expertise takes a long time to be acquired and that those who have some are not comfortable with these dynamics of share, with tools that makes it possible. And without the added value brought by those people it’s harder to involve those who can take benefits from this knowledge redistribution, the latter thinking the gain won’t be worth the energy and the time they’ll spend.
It’s also interesting to notice that those who don’t join communities within their company are sometimes very involved in communities outsid, in their private life.
Two acknowledgements : talking about participative dynamics, it’s the individual who decides whether to join or not, whatever the company wants, and communities on the web weren’t built : their existence was noticed.
This takes us to a conclusion : we can’t buid communities, but in the other hand, when people decide we see them emerge.
So nothing happens without need nor interest. I’m not talking about the objective interest to adopt such or such way or working but of the subjective interest that people have to do it. And more, the interest people feel (the objective interest may exist without being felt). Whatever, what leads people to do things is not the same inside and outside the enterprise.
As I read in this post “We build community out of crisis and we build community by accident, but we do not know how to build community by design“.
I don’t think we have to rely on fate to build viable and efficient communities. In fact we don’t have to build communities, whathas to be created is interest. Furthermore, companies that experienced crisis are more successful with communities building than others : crisis make it necessary to change, to work differently together. The Finaref case demonstrate it in a non crisis context : involvement in a community was born from a business interest because it was a true enterprise project, what made it easier to reward everyone’s participation.
Saying that I also ask experts a question : why do we focus on communities of practices and don’t pay attention to communities of interest ? Obviously, saying interest, I think about an interest to do something with a personal or collective benefit (achieving an assigned task, getting a reward…it depends on the people)
Can’t we say a community of practices is born and rely on a community of interest ? That people gather when they have a common interest in doing something ?
