The relevance of the open source model for communities of practice
I totally agree with Mitch Kapor’s when he says:
“Open source heralds a global paradigm shift in social and economic value creation of enormous proportions, the extent of which is almost completely unappreciated.”
While Mitch admits he is going out on a limb with this statement, I think the simple idea of a distributed community parcelling work out work and collaboratively building an information source which, in turn, is valuable to the community that builds it, appears to be a model which can create significant value in an information economy. The key ingredient is the group development of an artifact which provides value back to the group. A positive feedback loop which we know sets the stage for interesting complexities and emergence.
The open source model, with some modifications, could also be applied to cultivating a community of practice. I’m a member of a community called ActKM, which is a group of people interested in knowledge management in the public sector. At the moment this group of more than 1,000 members simply passes emails to one another on YahooGroups. Imagine if an open source model was applied. The the group might identify a set of tasks they would like to have done for the community, such as building new tools to map knowledge. These tasks would result in an accumulating body of knowledge that would form the basis for new discussion. New comers would be referred to the knowledge base and be encouraged to update, modify based on the new perspectives they bring to the group.
Shawn, author of Putting Stories to Work, is one of the world's leading business storytelling consultants. He helps executive teams find and tell the story of their strategy. When he is not working on strategy communication, Shawn is helping leaders find and tell business stories to engage, to influence and to inspire. Shawn works with Global 1000 companies including Shell, IBM, SAP, Bayer, Microsoft & Danone. Connect with Shawn on:
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I think what’s key here is that both Open Source and really effective communities of practice work because of the culture of giving implicit in each.
This is how scientific communities work too. Look at Lewis Hyde’s work in the book “The Erotic Life of Property” which doesn’t sound relevant but absolutely nails this stuff.