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« New technology solves the Green issue – ‘Printing’ | Main | The difference between cost and value »
A Practical Example of Applying ‘Communities’
I got an interesting opportunity to apply the thinking on creating and using communities that I and my colleagues have been developing. Quick recap on previous blogs on the topic; two parallel streams of activity are visible:
1) Social Networks
2) the notion of everyone and everything being available in a connected infinite Mesh spanning companies, countries etc. as opposed to the internal ‘Matrix’ model of a finite number of point to point links.
My argument is that the Mesh is creating Social Networks, and Social Networks are moving into Business use as a tool to help customers, employees, partners to share and work in a new collaborative manner based around ‘interactions’ to find optimal possibilities. These Web 2.0 technologies are people centric, therefore separate and different to current IT systems which are machine centric and based on the ‘transactions’ to create data. BUT we need to find a way of creating different social networks for different purposes and the purpose will both driven membership and the tools/capabilities required by the community.
The opportunity was a requirement by a government department to encourage children to adopt hobbies out of school with the view that this would decrease street crime and hooliganism from bored teenagers hanging round on street corners. The question was how to organise such an initiative and of course the ‘given’ was a traditional model of top down organisation. The alternative approach is based on the universal use of the web accessed through PCs and phones by teenagers today.
Applying the principles of four types of communities, each with its own and different reasons for existing, therefore requiring different and appropriate tools to allow the community members to work together. The top level community is created around ‘shared values’ and in this case the originators of the idea who are clearly motivated by high level social values. However this will need to be driven into the next level down of ‘shared goals’ where several communities may be created, say one of sports, another on music, etc and here the members of each will be working to decide how to create interesting and involving communities for their topic. The difference between the sharing of information and agreement on concepts in shared values area and the building of action plans in the shared goals community highlights the very different nature of each as well as the different tools needed.
The last two communities are easier to understand by going to the bottom of the stack and the community of ‘acquaintances’. This is where you are encouraging as many people as possible to join because its ‘fun’ with interesting stuff so you will introduce all the usual elements of a ‘social’ network to encourage the teenagers to join in with their friends.
Linking this to the values and goals communities is the crucial community of ‘shared interests’ which is where the ‘shared goal’ community creates the framework and content that encourages the involvement of from the open community of ‘acquaintances’. This the community of ‘shared values’ achieves its ‘goals’ through creating the ‘interests’ that will lead to participation from the broad uncommitted community of ‘acquaintances’. Hope this real example makes the point clearer and can help explore this in other industries types, etc.
Posted by Andy Mulholland on December 12, 2007 in
Innovation
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Comments
# on December 14, 2007 3:15 AM, Scott Stephens said:
Really interesting train of thought. I had conceptualized a "community" to share and advance business thought based on wikis, blogs, and face-to-face. I have personnaly experimented with social networks (about 30 contacts in Linkedin) but haven't really figured how to extract value. But from a business side I would think the problem is two-fold. Can you build a community of business-focused thinkers who are comfortable with web tools? How many non-IT business people have the time to devote to building online communities?
It might be interesting to see if any business anthropologists asking the same kinds of question (not the dynamics of facebook but what the "new" communities might look like.
# on December 14, 2007 3:15 AM, Scott Stephens said:
Really interesting train of thought. I had conceptualized a "community" to share and advance business thought based on wikis, blogs, and face-to-face. I have personnaly experimented with social networks (about 30 contacts in Linkedin) but haven't really figured how to extract value. But from a business side I would think the problem is two-fold. Can you build a community of business-focused thinkers who are comfortable with web tools? How many non-IT business people have the time to devote to building online communities?
It might be interesting to see if any business anthropologists asking the same kinds of question (not the dynamics of facebook but what the "new" communities might look like.
# on December 14, 2007 10:12 AM, andy mulholland said:
Hi Scott
what i can't work out is whether people will naturally move into this organising structure, partly to get out of social networks the personal value they want, or whether it will happen through commercial forces using social networks as an organising business structure.
i know of one example of a sme business that is using Facebook as their 'intranet' as an example. talked to two of the top software venders on this topic and then are definately working on this approach.
then we have Open Social ....
# on December 14, 2007 11:27 AM, suneel said:
Hi Scoot
Actually the value of network increases as users increase at some threshold point its becomes a norm/necessity ...imagine telephone in few wealthy houses would have been no good but as network increase then it becomes a standard tool .....business will have to adopt to it ..and in todays world some communities (Apps/web 2.0) have reached that threshold and other are yet to be there........
for example one of my clients I was working for Kodak ofoto an online photosharing site was brought down by a single blogger writing and posting stuff sitting inside katrina hurricane.....all America was following it bringing down 100's of racks of servers..........
The community -or the dynamics of the "MESH" itself will draw more business ,users and communities there by creating "Value" ........
# on December 14, 2007 4:37 PM, andy mulholland said:
my take on this is that peer pressure, social inclusion whatever you want to call it can be relied on to draw people into social networks, but if they can't find value for themselves in the networks then they will leave.
i think thats the fear factor of whether the existing mainstream social networks can develop an adequate value model.
btw gartner is officially saying that the whole social networking thing is hyped and not to be taken seriously for business use. but then if you can remember back to the 1996 period and the gartner comments on the Internet ...... !