Characteristics and transformation

Hello dear ‘learner’,

  I am so pleased to let you know that I have found out even more about the communities of practice. I hope you are on the same page as me as I would like to share with you my ideas and maybe, who knows, debate them.

  So, from the last time we have spoken, I have learnt that these communities, as you can probably imagine, are voluntary. Despite this fact, what makes them successful over time is their ability to generate enough excitement, relevance and value to attract and engage members. This is the phenomenon that the authors called ‘aliveness’. Don’t you agree with them? I know I do. I mean, if you’re not actively participating to these meetings, if you’re not brainstorming on a given subject or idea, if you do not actively communicate with each other, it wouldn’t be called a community. You need energy,- positive energy - to sustain an entire community and you need to invite the interaction that makes your community to be alive.

  Now, a more theoretical knowledge of a community relies in its design. So, the design principles that are stated by the authors of the ‘Communities of practice’ book are the following:

1. Design for evolution.

2. Open a dialogue between inside and outside perspectives.

3. Invite different levels of participation.

4. Develop both public and private community spaces.

5. Focus on value.

6. Combine familiarity and excitement.

7. Create a rhythm for the community.

  If you were to think about this matter, they are totally true. You know how it looks like in practice, but, once written down, it all makes sense now. Making the design principles explicit makes it possible to be more flexible and improvisational. The key to designing for evolution is to combine design elements in a way that catalyzes community development, such as: the physical structures (e.g places), but as the social and organizational structures (e.g community coordinator). Now, a community needs an insider’s perspective to lead the discovery of what the community is about, but it also needs an outside perspective related to the potential development of the community. This I could not agree more, because, you see, we –as part of a community- tend to find it hard to imagine how much more could our community evolve, how many goals are there to be set, how to understand better the issues inside the community and so on. Also, during their evolution, communities were creating standards of good practice, organizing and systematizing their activities.

  Oh well, the communities were not always like this, of course. They have evolved in time, they have suffered radical transformations, they have grown, they have fallen, but in the end, they kept on continually evolving. The studies show how there are five stages of community development: potential, coalescing, maturing, stewardship and transformation. To be more specific, we can observe the following image:

  Given the above, we may be tempted to think that maturity is a time of stability, but communities, like people, change and grow during their maturity as much as they do during their formation. The ongoing life of an active community is rich and complex. It contains many relationships, many levels of connection, and many subgroups within it. Mature communities go through cycles of high and low energy as they respond, adjust and reorganize. Isn’t that right? How I see things, the composing elements could not exist but together and linked.  The life of a community may have its ups and downs, but this is part of its existence and it defines the community itself. Going through their life, communities need support to continue. This support must come from the energy, from the passion and from the strength of its members. As long as the community’s members efforts are sustainable and continuous, the community will go further on.

  As a side note, what I gave found interesting again are the ‘distributed communities’, which by the book means any community of practice that cannot rely on face-to-face meetings and interactions as its primary vehicle for connecting members ( as C. Dede stated in its paper, these communities refer to virtual or distance education initiatives). Thinking about it, nowadays we have more distributed communities rather than the normal ones and this is primarily because of the evolution of the technology from the last century. They are no different than local communities, but the fact that they share ideas and insights, help each other, document procedures and influence operating teams and business units across communication networks.

  The transformation potentially brought about by communities of practice is twofold. First, communities become more than an integral way of running the business; they become the focal structure, a point of stability in an organization constantly reshaping itself to match the demands of a market in flux. Second, communities do not merely transform how the business operates; they transform it continuously.  This way, it has been proven that transformation has become a way of life.

  Today’s post was a little bit more theoretical, but I hope it was enjoyable as well. So, until the next time, keep up the good work within your communities, because together we are so much more powerful . :)