Building a Community 1

“Community building talent is the single most precious resource in the modern world.” Peter Drucker

Leadership requires audience. In the past, leaders joined or started organizations to get things done. In the future, leaders will likely join or start online communities to gather resources necessary to bring about their visions. In this series of posts, I will try to identify best practices and rules governing the process of community building.

Rule #1: Identify a common trait for the community members.

Digital Community Research

A few days ago I came across an interesting research topic at AnthroVlog focusing on digital participation. I was drawn by the title “What Defines a Community?”, and although I haven’t reviewed too much of its content yet, it has pointed my attention to two facts.

Firstly, to be able to lead a virtual group of people who need to work together, there must be a sense of community among them. This is a major motivational factor: when I feel I’m part of a community, I also want to contribute.

Secondly, this research is conducted by an anthropologist. Looking for ways to define leadership in social networks, I have thought about disciplines such as sociology, management, social psychology, but I haven’t considered before anthropology to be important. Well, I guess I was wrong…

Open Projects: Some Draft Ideas

What are the key elements of successful open source projects that engage hundreds of people?

Imagine an almost ideal information model of human – every element (gene, particle, organ …) is described and its characteristics are stored in form of parameters. There are relationships defined between those elements, which can take parameters on their own. Furthermore, imagine a group of people who volunteer to be described by means of this model. They provide their genetic code, and allow for storing information of actual parameters recording the state of their body.

Hamel vs. Davenport

I am struggling with the amount of publications on social networking and leadership, and the observation that I am contributing to this curse of abundance makes me shiver. To get some quality insights, I went to Harvard Business Online and ended up reading two related blog posts by Tom Davenport and Gary Hamel. To make it more interesting, they represented quite contrary views on the value that social networking adds to the business.

Introduction

How do we get a bunch of people met on Facebook to build a water well in Africa? How can a company convince hundreds of independent researchers to design a best selling commercial product?

Hundreds of engineers, designers, artists spend their free time trying to build an open source car, in an effort that is an example on how social technologies, Web 2.0, collaboration and networking tools change the nature people get things done. If you are interested to learn how we can conciously lead people in such environments, join me on this research journey, subscribe to this blog, and by all means, share your opinion in the comments section or write me an email.