Full Circle Associates

Harry Collier has put up the slide decks from the 2004 Infonortics Virtual Communities Conference held in The Hague June 14-15. Fair warning: slide decks don't convey the content, context nor experience of any of the presentations. If one piques your interest, post a comment and we can try and build some of that context.

At the conference (besides taking a risk and making a bit of a fool of myself as my colleagues and I tried to stretch the form of 30-minute conference presentations with our bit on "Improvisation in distributed communities of practice" - I still need to write about it!), I was very interested in the survey Jenny and Joe completed on the state of virtual communities in the business sector. They are currently working on a report which will come out soon. I'll be sure to blog it!

Their data overview can be found here.

A couple of things struck me:

• Dang, it is great to see an overview, a reflection of where we've been. Wow! Thank you Joe and Jenny.
  
• The five strategies synthesized out of the recommendations from the respondents felt very familiar and common sense to me. Again, there is some smile of relief to have one's ideas validated in some ways. (I'll post them below)
  
• The data made me wonder what I understood to be the "network" of people working in this field called "virtual communities." It used to feel clearer to me, but now the application of group online interaction tools flows across far more sectors than it did in the late 90's. Even the word community is at questin (and rightfully so in my view.)
  
• Where is my place in this network? What is my community within the network that allows me to hone and grow my practice of online group facilitation? It too is much more diffuse and rather unconnected.
  
• I am used to hearing the voices of academics and bloggers and I notice their absence of sorts in the summary results. I recognize that this is a survey in the business context which impacted the survey sample. But it made me recognize that the things that influence me are far wider ranging. I had not realized that. This was really helpful for my thinking processes. Or maybe I don't recognize their voices in this report and expected something different. Food for thought.
  
• What is the role of visualizing networks? (half baked question)
  
• How do we help build this field? I do believe it is a field, but it is still very unformed.

Here are the 5 recommendations from Joe and Jenny:

1. Think local and real: real and virtual and local and global are merging. What opportunities exist for your community?
   
2. Get Networking: social networking software is the latest community tool. Try it and apply your learnings to your online group.
   
3. Empower the People: People want to participate in new ways. New media and mobile are only the start.
   
4. Raise the Bar on Data: What data are you currently capturing? Don't stop at ROI - insights from discussion can be just as important.
   
5. Advocate and Educate: Your community knowledge has value. Find better ways to articulate what your community is and does.