Technology is an important aspect in building community, especially as citizens of a digital world. We now see an entire generation of people that have grown up on America Online's Instant Messaging. In studying this what we see is that the online world enables a virtual community space -- much as the water cooler or coffee pot was for many generations of Government and corporate employees.
Online space is no substitute for physical space. But what we see in best practice organizations is the delicate balance of using the online world to enhance the offline community.
Therefore, it is important to analyze the online community space separately. The process of choosing technology solutions for a community is similar to that of choosing any technology product. We divide this into the following steps:
Define the CoP mission statement, value proposition, performance measures and metrics, and pilot project achievement benchmarks
Establish overall CoP governance, membership, and define roles
Develop implementation plans including events plan, marketing and communication plan, education and skills plan, and advisory service plan
Develop functional requirements, identify COTs products that can support the pilot CoPs, and analyze and evaluate products and recommend appropriate technology solutions
In analyzing the functional requirements for Community of Practice suites, most include:
A home page to assert their existence and describe their domain and activities
A conversation space for on-line discussions of a variety of topics
A facility for floating questions to the community or a subset of the community
A directory of membership with some information about their areas of expertise in the domain
A some cases, a shared workspace for synchronous electronic collaboration, discussion, or meeting
A document repository for their knowledge base
A search engine good enough for them to retrieve things they need from their knowledge base
Community management tools, mostly for the coordinator but sometimes also for the community at large, including the ability to know who is participating actively, which documents are downloaded, how much traffic there is, which documents need updating, etc.
The ability to create sub-communities, subgroups, and project teams
