This is an excellent article. Thank you Steve. The Wenger, et al book is absolutely worth reading.
I agree that a CoP is more than tech features, however it is important to include the features needed for the community members to support each other. I manage an internal community at Children's Hospital Boston and our community is not made up of expertise to create new tech features.
Members want to voluntarily spend time helping others plan events, work through important issues, etc. The digital community allows us to do that with so many employees with different schedules and working from different parts of the world. If those tech features (message boards, calendars, todo lists) don't exist, it makes it tough for your community to do that.
If you want to enhance your CoP with websites, wikis, blogs, or social networks, you do need to think about the website itself.
Authored Comments
This is an excellent article. Thank you Steve. The Wenger, et al book is absolutely worth reading.
I agree that a CoP is more than tech features, however it is important to include the features needed for the community members to support each other. I manage an internal community at Children's Hospital Boston and our community is not made up of expertise to create new tech features.
Members want to voluntarily spend time helping others plan events, work through important issues, etc. The digital community allows us to do that with so many employees with different schedules and working from different parts of the world. If those tech features (message boards, calendars, todo lists) don't exist, it makes it tough for your community to do that.
If you want to enhance your CoP with websites, wikis, blogs, or social networks, you do need to think about the website itself.