CAT | Community
23
Findability
0 Comments | Posted by mindby in Collaboration, Community, Knowledge Management
Originally published @ OnCollabNet
Imagine being lost on a deserted island with no hope of being discovered with only a volleyball named Wilson to keep you company. There’s a reason pirates used marooning as a form of torture. It’s a miserable existence (if you can call it that) that usually doesn’t end so well. But yet that’s what becomes of most corporate knowledge. It’s left on various file servers across the enterprise with little hope of discovery or rescue (aka. reuse).
In my last post entitled Strategic Reuse Process, we looked at an overall framework for analyzing how information flows through an organization and the hurdles encountered on its way to reuse. But how does an artifact go from Publication to Discovery (see here for definition)? In this post I want to dig a little deeper and discuss the first hurdle on our way to reuse, Findability.
find-a-bil-ity n
a. The quality of begin locatable or navigable
b. The degree to which a particular object is easy to discover or locate.
c. The degree to which a system or environment supports navigation and retrieval
Peter Morville from Ambient Findability (more…)
8
Strategic Reuse Process
0 Comments | Posted by mindby in Collaboration, Community, Knowledge Management, Productivity, Strategy
Originally published @ OnCollabNet as Strategic Reuse Process
Community managers have a tough job. They deal with lots of different stakeholders trying to find that elusive “middle ground”. They incessantly cheer on community activities and push adoption of collaboration best practices; but when it comes to validating their position through tangible and quantifiable metrics it can sometimes seem daunting. Is the best measure user participation? How about community size? Each of these seem like great things, and they are, but typically organizations don’t have a lot of tolerance for soft measures that don’t directly impact the “bottom-line”.
Recently I have been working to identify ways in which organizational performance gains can be tied to community activities. Since my current position involves helping large organizations increase performance from their development teams, I started first by looking at something that may seem far removed from community, knowledge reuse. (more…)
Originally posted by me @ OnCollabNet as Hold On.
The amount of control a community has over process and direction within a project has recently come up in a situation I’ve been involved with and I think it’s a great topic for a post since it strikes at the heart of many company’s trials and tribulations in creating vibrant communities. The real question in these situations is not one of control but of trust. Can you just be along for the ride and let someone else influence your project even if you don’t agree with everything they do?
Many organizations and people find it difficult to let go and allow their communities to shape the overall direction and goals of their projects. They fear that by allowing users to get involved at a deeper level chaos will ensue and they’ll be mired in endless debate over what they perceive as insignificant issues. However, the opposite of control is not chaos, the opposite of control is trust. Trust that you’re not the only one who has good ideas. Trust that even if it doesn’t follow your established processes it might be okay. Trust that you don’t know everything!
“If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem.”
–Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln may have understood trust and community better than anyone in the history of the United States. He knew that maintaining trust meant having the people’s confidence… and with confidence you can lead. I can’t imagine having to make the kind of decisions that he did, but I can imagine how important maintaining the people’s trust must have been to him through that period in history. Every leader must have his community’s trust to be effective.
Building and maintaining trust stems from two elements, transparency and action, one without the other will not work, but together they have proven to be a winning combination for instilling the necessary confidence to effectively lead.
(more…)
4
Community Building 101
3 Comments | Posted by mindby in Community, Leadership, Open Source, Reputation and Trust, Strategy, Tips and Tricks
Originally published in Open Source Business Resource January 2010
“…success comes entirely from people and the system within which they work. Results are not the point. Developing the people and the system so that together they are capable of achieving successful results is the point.”
Leading Lean Software Development
Recently, that quote stirred some controversy among my peers. The part about “results are not the point” was hard for some people to understand and come to grips with. Aren’t results always the point? Well, as with most things, “It depends”. The people and community that evolve around an open source software project will ultimately determine its success. Even if the core team launches the project with spectacular productivity and results, this phase of evolution will be fleeting if the necessary processes and community to make the project a long lasting success are not put into place.
This article presents some of the actions open source community leaders can take to ensure not only results, but a system that encourages productivity and longevity.
