Best Practice in Community Building and Information Discovery

- excerpted from the paper...

Introduction

This paper draws on our practical experience in building knowledge sharing communities and in establishing and maintaining effective information discovery facilities.

Effective knowledge networks address the needs of organisations to be able to create, share and use tacit, implicit and explicit knowledge.

The case studies within this presentation focus on two aspects:

• building online communities to improve the creation, sharing and use of tacit and implicit knowledge
• creating the infrastructure to support effective management and discovery of tacit, implicit and explicit knowledge

Knowledge Networks

Any organisation or group which works together to achieve a common goal inherently depends on the capacity of the members to apply their knowledge and for effective group operation to share that knowledge with other group members. A substantial proportion of the knowledge which an organisation draws upon is the implicit and tacit knowledge of its group members.

Sharing implicit and tacit knowledge is dependent upon interaction between the group members. It is through dialogue, discussion, debate, shared reflection that knowledge is shared and enhanced within a group.

The effectiveness of this sharing is dependent upon the quality of the interactions which in turn are dependent on the quality of the relationships between the groups members. Time, effort, energy and emotion devoted to building stronger relationships between group members provide a many-fold return in terms of improved knowledge sharing and creation for the group members.

Building stronger relationships within a group is the same as building a stronger community - it involves building better understanding, greater commitment and more effective interactions and support between group members.

Online Communities

Our experience with online communities derives from participation in a wide variety of communities over the last five years, ranging from:

• online conferences and courses, typically lasting 3-5 weeks
• several private discussion forums exploring topics of interest, often around knowledge management, one lasting six months, another lasting two years
• an online project aimed at building a commercially viable online network of knowledge professionals which proceeded for two years and failed.

The key common characteristics or definitional elements of these are:

1. a group of people with a common interest, point of focus, or purpose;
2. a need to create and share knowledge;
3. participation (and sharing) occurring on a voluntary / no cost basis;
4. based on asynchronous, text based communications;
5. using an online, Internet based, discussion forum (as opposed to solely using email).

Benefits of Online Communities

The benefits of establishing and supporting online communities fall into two broad categories:

• enhancing participation and hence the contribution of members
• increasing the value derived from the participation/interactions which occur