The role of metaphor in building an online community

Posted by  Shawn Callahan —June 22, 2005
Filed in Communication

Nancy White pointed me to this excellent post by Kathy Sierra which describes how the online community, javaranch, was built on the principle of members …

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Complex systems at wikipedia

Posted by  Shawn Callahan —June 22, 2005
Filed in News

A great description of complex systems is emerging on wikipedia.

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Where should your community budget go?

Posted by  Shawn Callahan —June 20, 2005
Filed in Collaboration

I was just re-reading some papers from IBM’s Institute for Knowledge-Based Organizations (now called Institute for Business Value). I’m writing a report describing an approach …

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Building stronger relationships in communities of practice AND lurkers

Posted by  Shawn Callahan —June 19, 2005
Filed in Collaboration

Nancy White points us to a short report developed and written by seven CPSquare community members. The topic is one that has interested me for …

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The maximum number of people we can deal with in a network

Posted by  Shawn Callahan —June 17, 2005
Filed in Collaboration

Dave Snowden used to say that we can only know 150 people at any particular time or for any single network (read identity). This has …

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Steve Jobs tells three stories about himself

Posted by  Shawn Callahan —June 17, 2005
Filed in Business storytelling

A couple of days ago Steve Jobs made the commencement address to students at Stanford. He tells three simple stories about himself with great effect. …

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Some great reports by Etienne Wenger and others

Posted by  Shawn Callahan —June 16, 2005
Filed in Collaboration

In case you haven’t already found Etienne Wenger’s publication page, here is the link. In particular I would recommend the report to the CIO Council of …

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A great story of community of practice development

Posted by  Shawn Callahan —June 9, 2005
Filed in Collaboration

I heard this story from the New Yorker was circulated among senior Defence staff in Canberra and it unnerved them. I think it’s a fantastic story of …

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Paper on communities of practice requested for online journal

Posted by  Shawn Callahan —June 2, 2005
Filed in Collaboration

I was pleasantly surprised last week to be asked by the editor of LeaderValues to submit my paper on communities of practice to their online …

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Agreed ways of working with timezones

Posted by  Shawn Callahan —May 23, 2005
Filed in Collaboration

I’m reading an excellent book at the moment called Distributed Work by Pamela Hinds and Sara Kiesler (eds.). While reading the chapter on ‘Face-to-face Communication’ …

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