Claire Chaundy – Organised Chaos
My opinion in the context of knowledge management is measure at your own peril. Numerical measures can too easily become targets. I prefer the approach suggested by Wenger et al (in Cultivating Communities of Practice) of using systematic anecdote collection as the most effective means to demonstrate the value of networking, knowledge sharing and collaboration. A well told story is far more powerful and presents far less risk.
How will you define the charactertics between various communities and how will this be measured ?? e.g
Communities of Learning
Communities of Practice
Communities of Issues
Are the characteristics between communities the important thing? I think the process of systematically collecting anecdotes will stay the same, it'll just be the content that will differ depending on what the communities are setting out to achieve.
Peter - not quite sure what you mean. Aren't these communities differentiated only by what they're about - in the same way that a community of C programmers may differ from a community of knitters !
So, as Claire says, the process is basically the same [although the actual mechanism may differ].
Actually Anu they ARE not the same.. at a meta level they do !!
Let me try to explain what I see with the communities
Communities of Issue --"Where Results are obtained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems. All can hope to get solving a problem is to restore normalcy." - Peter Drucker
Communities of Practice -- ""groups of people informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint venture." -Wenger & Jean Lave
Communities of Learning --
"Increasingly, successful organizations are building competitive edge though less controlling and more learning- that is, through continually creating and sharing the courage, imagination, patience and perseverance necessary in a knowledge creating organization." -Peter Senge.
Thanks for your email - I have to admit I found it a little hard to follow, so I hope I haven't misinterpreted your comments. I'm gonna post this as a comment as well
For me, the communities you have described aren't communities - they're manifestations of culture - a company has a firefighting culture, or a learning culture etc.
And measurement in any of these aspects I think is hard. One could [and I am] think about trying to measure information diffusion [think of information as a disease spreading from vector to vector] which would allow some of the tools and processes from epidemiology to be brought over. Unfortunately, it can be much easier to test for disease than for understanding !
Other measures include typical survey type metrics [ask people to respond on awareness and understanding - not very trustworthy on an indvidualistic basis, but may be more accurate when aggregated].
There are probably secondary indicators that maybe testable - eg if people understand a certain thing, then they are more likely to do x, where x is something that can be measured.
The challenge is in building a credible and repeatable framework that doesn't rely on magic numbers and horrible assumptions - but if it was easy, then we'd be doing it already !