Social Network Analysis has spent alot of its evolution and development down in the weeds where the expert has been king. Crunching and analysing. Not surprising really. There are traps for young players in SNA and there is a clear role for someone like an expert to keep us clear of traps. Eventually however, when the […]

The actKM list has a discussion underway to collect stories of how people have (either successfully or otherwise) tried to get management support for their KM activities. The story below is the one I submitted. An engineering firm I worked for had a number of management-initiated communities of practice that were languishing and I was […]

John Smith and Beverly Trayner have written an interesting and useful paper describing how community coordinators can use a combination of online technology and face-to-face meetings to enhance learning. In particular their designs for ramping-up discussions online in preparation for face-to-face meeting and then ramp-down online, shows how we better integrate the virtual with the […]

Mark and I thoroughly enjoyed ourselves over the last couple of days delivering our communities of practice workshops. The discussions were excellent. Thanks to all the participants. One conversation led me to rethink how to conceptualise the relationship between projects and CoPs. In many organisations projects are the lifeblood. It’s how things get done. These […]

It’s interesting how I’ve found myself drawn into discussion lately around the difficulties of facilitating engineers and scientists. If facilitating engineers and scientists is difficult, imagine then, the challenge of how to educate, train and inform engineers and scientists on ‘how to be more facilitative’. With many organisations now developing communities of practice to meet strategic […]

For years we have been listening to presentations, reading articles and working with organisations in the KM field and probably the only consistent theme is the lack of agreement as to what KM is.   The lack of a consistent way to talk about knowledge management effectively disempowers us from taking concerted action.  It makes competitors of those […]

I’m always on the lookout for good quotes. I found these in the forward to Michael Lissack and Johan Roos’ book The Next Common Sense: Mastering complexity through coherence. “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our methods of questioning.” Walter Heisenberg “Our theories determine what we measure.” Albert Einstein “You […]

Steve Denning has compiled some of his recent posts on list-servs like com-prac and made the compilation available on his website. He covers the following topics: Is a request for the ROI of COPs legitimate? Is ROI the right measure for CoPs? Do stories support numbers or vice versa? What’s the motive behind asking “what’s […]

Aber Whitcomb, CTO for MySpace, revealed to Robert Scoble some of the secrets behind MySpace’s popularity. They sound similar to the advise one might give to anyone starting a community of practice. They made sure influentials in Hollywood (stars, bands) were among the first users. They listen to their users and add features frequently (usually noticeable new features every […]

I was reminded last week that projects provide great opportunities to develop communities of practice.  No surprises really, with all that project time and effort spent consulting with stakeholders, reconciling divergent positions and building relationships to effect a meaningful change. But many opportunities are missed to create communities of practice as part of project or […]