E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

What Is (A) Community?

While a rather fascinating and inspiring conversation is developing nicely further on over in Google Plus, around a recent blog entry that my good friend Euan Semple published over at his blog under the title “Ten ways to create a knowledge ecology” (A superb piece of writing that, by the way, I can strongly recommend you all have a look and read it through as well, in case you haven’t done it just yet, as I do believe it’s probably one of the best articles published this year around the social transformation that businesses need to go through in order to become and live social, and help prepare for that knowledge ecology that Euan hints so nicely), the topic of communities and gardening communities through community managers (Or community facilitators) came up again and I thought I would go ahead and share with you folks this quick blog post where I can reference a rather interesting and very thought-provoking short video clip that tries to answer the question we have all been trying to answer all along: What is (a) community?

You would remember how in the recent past I put together another blog entry around this very same topic trying to explain and define what a community is, and, most importantly, what it is not!, under the heading “Community Management Fundamentals – Where Do I Start?” Well, earlier on today, I bumped into this short blog post by my good friend Nancy White where she is referencing a brief video clip, rather inspiring, I may have to add, that pretty much explains it all very nicely on what distinguishes a community, and its many traits, and what not. Worth while watching it through, for sure! Thus I have taken the liberty of embedding the video over here, produced and released by non-profit organisation Essential Arts, as part of Bilocal, so that you folks could also have a look and watch it along:

What is a Community? from Essential Arts on Vimeo.

Pretty inspiring, don’t you think? Well, on that very same Google Plus conversation I linked above, my good friend, John Tropea shared another link to a recent blog article he put together under “Knowledge ecology related to facilitating CoPs“, where he shares extensively what his experience in helping facilitate communities of practice has been all along, by referencing and annotating further a good number of the various different entry points that Euan himself referenced on the original blog post on knowledge ecologies. Another must-read!

The rather interesting part from John’s article is his very succinct distinction between a community manager and a community facilitator in helping get the most out of the overall community experience without mandating how communities should really operate. Quite the opposite eventually, i.e. empowering them to manage their own flows of knowledge, their own connections amongst community members, how they collaborate with one another, and how they can help address business problems effectively, but without having too much intervention happening altogether. Acting more like leaders and facilitators leading and showing the way, rather than (community) managers trying to manage just another project; in this case a community.

Lots of great tips in this regard shared across by John himself, that makes his blog entry a really good and worth while read for those folks who would want to unleash the full power of their own communities by perhaps just letting them go farther enough to discover their own value and build upon it over the course of time, as CheeChin Liew nicely added into the conversation with this priceless quote, picking up on another one from the one and only Dave Snowden:

“You can’t manage community but you can create a community ecology”

And that folks is one of the many many reasons why I am having a total blast at the moment, over at Google Plus engaging in such conversations as the one I tried to portrait briefly with this blog post that would surely help us all mature further on about our own ideas on the art of not just managing but facilitating successfully (online) communities. Yes, indeed, it’s a tough job! No-one said it would be an easy one, but with priceless conversations, resources and further links shared across by those in the know, as mentioned above, somehow the job does seem a little bit easier now, don’t you think?

Social Learning at TELUS by Dan Pontefract

And while I am still digging the Google Plus experience, confirming that, for now, it’s going to stick around with me for a while, time and time again it keeps proving its great value, beyond the initial learning curve and that set of discussions and interactions about getting around the tool itself. On a rather regular basis one keeps bumping into not only some rather interesting and engaging dialogue amongst your social network(s), but also precious little gems that are worth while sharing across beyond G+. Like, for instance, a recent Plus entry that my good friend, Dan Pontefract, Director of Learning and Collaboration at TELUS, shared across where he included a link to a recent video clip, where he was interviewed to talk about their experiences with social software tools within the enterprise. In case you haven’t seen it just yet, let me encourage you all and have a look into Social Learning at TELUS.

It’s a rather short interview, that lasts for a little bit over two and a half minutes, but at the same time rather telling and quite revealing. In it, Dan shares how they keep making use of social tools like blogs, wikis, microblogging, etc. etc. in order to help people not only collaborate more efficiently and effectively, but also as a key, core learning activity, that helps sparks new ideas, new methods of solving business problems, while still keeping it all rather engaging and informal.

In fact, while going through the video clip myself, I noticed three different things that I thought were worth while mentioning as well, which were coming out of the interview itself in a rather succinct manner, but that I think is equally important. To name:

• Social Software as a powerful Collaboration AND Learning environment: Yes, indeed, quite refreshing to see how the folks at TELUS have combined both social computing with learning and made them both take a big share of how work gets done within the corporate environment. It’s interesting to notice how heavy they rely on these social tools to help promote self-/group learning activities, to the point where they may well be self-sufficient, both producing and consuming that content they create and share across. Power to the people, if you ask me, and perhaps nothing more empowering than letting your employees take good care of their own learning activities, while on the job. They probably know better about their needs than you do.
• You don’t have to have everyone on board to get value: Indeed, something that we have seen ourselves, over at IBM as well with some of our social software tools, like IBM Connections Bookmarks where about 35k fellow IBMers make use of it, yet the entire IBM population of 400k benefit from it, because the search results from our corporate Intranet search engine are injected with those social bookmarks that folks keep adding along. And it looks like the folks at TELUS share a similar experience; while they may not have achieved just yet 100% penetration with their social tools, the ones who are making active use of them are helping everyone else get enough value, perhaps not just producing valuable content, but digesting it as well.

  This is, in my opinion, a critical point regarding the adoption of social tools within the enterprise, mainly from the perspective of setting up the right expectations and encouraging those who would want to make use of the tools to use them, while allowing the remaining ones adjust accordingly and figure out by themselves whether they would need to jump in as well or not. Let them figure out the value they would want to get from it is probably as good as it gets in order to allow for knowledge workers to understand how, when, why and what to contribute, whenever they may be ready.

• Don’t mandate, but empower: Which brings me to the third point Dan shared across that perhaps folks may not have noticed, because of how subtlety he shared it across, but that I think it’s quite important and paramount to understand what a successful adoption by most employees of these social tools would be like: don’t mandate their use, but empower your knowledge workforce to make the right decision(s) on whether they need to or don’t need to.

  He basically shared how at TELUS they don’t mandate folks to make use of social tools from top down, instead they allow their knowledge workers themselves to figure out whether they have a need to use them, or whether the pain points they may have could be solved by those social tools, but it’s all part of that play and experiment nature, where employees are allowed to explore by themselves and figure out the potential of social software to help them improve both their individual and group productivity. It’s all a matter of understanding that rather than managing it as a project and making it mandatory, it will always be much more productive leading the change, facilitating it, embracing it fully starting with yourself, regardless of where you may well be within the organisation, helping others how they could benefit themselves from making use of social networking. Management, all of a sudden, needs to turn into Leadership, an active leadership, by the way, that leads by example and not just by talking away about it.

There are plenty of other golden nuggets that I could mention on this blog post about Dan’s short interview, but I think, instead, I am going to encourage you all to have a look into the video clip yourselves, and watch through it. It will be worth while your time, I can surely guarantee you that. And from here, perhaps just share a special Thanks! to Dan for the inspiration and for sharing along the interview itself with all of us, on what it is like a successful adoption of social software within the enterprise. In this case, at TELUS. Well done!

Google Plus – One50, Two50 and TheRest

Over the last few days I pretty am sure folks may have noticed how things have been a little bit quiet over here in my blog, to the point where some of you may have wondered whether I am ready to go ahead and ditch it and instead point people to my Google Plus Profile, like some rather prominent and prolific bloggers have been doing as of late. The truth is that I am ready to make plenty of blunt moves on redefining my social networking presence out there on the Social Web, and I will be sharing some further insights on that regard very soon, but one thing for sure is that at this point in time my blog will remain where it is. I am not planning on muting for good my personal voice, my-self, my own thoughts out there on the Web just yet. However, in the last couple of days, I have been playing, experimenting and learning quite a bit more about Google Plus itself and how it will be redefining the way I interact on the Social Web. Yes, to me, so far, Plus is a keeper! And at this point I guess I am now ready to write another blog post, the fourth of the series, on the topic of one of its most disruptive and fundamentally paramount features: Circles.

Circles, on its own, makes it totally worth it working with Google Plus. I would probably even venture to state that perhaps it will be one of the most critical key capabilities that this new social networking site would have to offer to the whole Social Web. Yes, it’s that good! It’s an opportunity to help you decide and define how you would want to work and interact with your various social networks in a single space, without going crazy, or without having to create multiple identities. Or without having the system dictate how you can do it with very little interaction from your part. David Armano has put together an excellent blog post that describes, pretty nicely, the kind of impact that Circles will have with how we manage and participate further within our social networks. Worth while a read, for sure.

Ross Mayfield also put together a rather interesting and enlightening blog entry on this very same subject of Plus’ Circles along with a rather nifty, eye-opening and educational deck under the heading “Visual Guide to Circles in Google+“, which I have embedded below, so you can flip through the Slideshare slides quickly to get an idea of what they are and how they work:

To add further up, my good friends Dave Pollard, Alan Lepofsky and Stuart Henshall, amongst several others, have put together a couple of rather interesting and equally revealing posts, respectively, that describe for themselves what the actual main benefits are from using Circles in G+. And along with some other interesting reads made available out there in the last few days I guess we are in pretty good shape to understand how they work. But if I would have to pick up another article that would be rather instrumental in helping describe what Circles are and how they operate, I would probably have to point you folks to one of my favourite KM bloggers out there, my good friend, John Tropea, who a few days back put together “Facebook and Twitter are broadcast design models; Google Plus is a sharing design model“. One of those essential, must-read articles that you cannot miss to perhaps get exposed to some of the most comprehensive writing available out there on this particular topic. It’s a rather long blog post, but, believe me, it will be worth every single paragraph of it. It’s just brilliantly done!

Ok, so now that we are through with that introduction to try to explain Google Plus’ Circles, and its many many benefits, I thought I would spend the next few minutes sharing with you folks how I have actually set up mine initially, so that you could have a glimpse of how they are actually working out for me. The interesting thing is that, to begin with, I didn’t start them from scratch. I actually copied the same model I have been cultivating and nurturing with my Twitter Lists for over the last few months. Thus the first thing I did was to delete the already existing default ones and start mimicking the model I have for Twitter, which is, finally, working out just fine, after several failed attempts to look for a model that would work the way I wanted.

So what I am about to describe next is basically my own model for social networking out there for two of my favourite social networking tools which I have developed over the course of the years after experimenting and playing with multiple options. The good thing though is that in G+ it’s been much much easier to implement, because of the already existing work done with my Twitter timelines. So I just had to reproduce it and move along with it. And the way I got things going was with the initial creation of three magic circles (Or Twitter Lists). The ones where I spend most of my time at the moment out there on the Social Web and which, I am sure, as soon as you read about them you would be reminded of the Dunbar’s Number, although you will see how I have gone beyond that initial 150 limit, because for each of those three circles I haven’t established a maximum number of folks. I have let it develop and grow itself and see how further it would go. But let’s see it more in detail:

• One50: This is the first Circle I have created and in it I have grouped those folks who I have been following for years, way before social networks became mainstream, interacting and learning quite a bit from all of them over the course of time. They are my mentors, the ones who have got my highest level of social trust, although most of them don’t know it. They are the ones who have made and shaped what @elsua is today. They are the ones that I would want to follow and continue to learn from even when I am no longer participating actively on the Social Web. My essential core network that would transcend the world of the Web. The ones that I would want to keep in touch with on a regular basis no matter what. My closest friends and daily source of inspiration, if you would want to put it that way. 

  Interesting enough, from my One50 Twitter List, this is the group with the lowest number of folks who have moved over to Google Plus, and still, on its own, the main reason why I will keep making use of Twitter. At least, for now.

• Two50: This is the second Circle that I have created, and following a similar model to the one described above, it’s the one that I have used to group all of those folks who have similar roles, interests and affinities to the ones I have, folks who are interested in Knowledge Management, Collaboration, Learning, Communities, Social Computing, the Social Web, etc. etc. The group from which I learn plenty of new tricks and further insights every day on everything social, where a good number of conversations take place on the stuff we are all truly passionate about, i.e. helping accelerate the adoption of these social tools, both inside and outside of the firewall. These are like my pals, my partners in crime, the ones I trust to brainstorm, with whom I share across plenty of ideas, learn, collaborate and share my knowledge with without asking for anything in return. It’s based on a mutually rewarding and nurturing relationship of helping each other grow further in our collective sense of the network. The power of the network. 

  From this group, and like I was expecting it, almost all of them are in Google Plus already. It’s actually one of my largest Circles at the moment, so, since I treasure the conversations I have with them quite a bit, I have moved that Twitter List into a Circle knowing that unfollowing them in Twitter will not cause any damage, because we already know where we can find each other. Or, at least, I am hoping we know where we can find each other… hehe

• TheRest: This is the third Circle I have created and, probably the best way I can think of to describe the group of folks who are part of it is by mentioning that this is my group of acquaintances. Folks I am interested in keeping up with after an initial first contact, good conversation, knowledge sharing experience, etc. etc. knowing that at some point they will move up to Two50 or, even, One50. This is the most diverse group of them all, because it includes folks from a wide range of the interests I have in multiple topics, not just some of the ones I mentioned above. I probably don’t get to interact with them as often as with the other two Circles, but, at least, I make an effort to check, once a day, what they are up to, to keep up with those loose connections, hoping to strengthen them over time. 

  From my Twitter List, once again, the vast majority of them are already in Google Plus, so, just like I did with Two50, we have moved the conversations into Plus and I went ahead and unfollowed them on Twitter to help avoid cross posting of repetitive timelines and become a bit more focused on the conversations themselves, rather that the broadcasting nature of Twitter itself, which is eventually what Twitter will be turning into for me over time.

And that’s it! Those are my core Circles in Google Plus. But also in my Twitter Lists. What I have done though is a natural split of considering Twitter a broadcasting, messaging, notification system, whereas Google Plus will be the place where I plan to curate top-notch, best of breed content along with the conversations that may surface over time. So, yes, not planning on abandoning Twitter just yet, but certainly starting to redefine my new relationship with it, including a reduction in the amount of time I spend there on a daily basis. It’s no longer going to be my main method of engagement and participation on the Social Web. At least, for me. Just another broadcast mechanism. The one that has gotten that #1 spot on my daily social interactions is now Google Plus and will stay like that, for a while, judging from the depth and engagement of the conversations I have been having so far within each of those circles.

But, as a side note, I guess I should also probably mention on this blog post, to wrap it up, how these Circles are not the only ones I have. I have got a bunch of others that I have created as well from Twitter Lists, but that they have a very specific context that I am sure would become self-evident as soon as I share their names with a one liner annotation:

• Customers: Indeed, got a specific circle with the good number of customers I have already been interacting with on Twitter over the years, and which I have invited to come along and hang out with in Google Plus. Most of them are already in there and the experience has been rather pleasant; even more when we haven’t exchanged a single email but kept it all happening out there on the Social Web!
• IBMers: Of course, I put together this circle to group my fellow IBM colleagues AND alumni, who have been flocking like crazy to Google Plus, since the experience is pretty similar to what IBM Connections has been doing for us for years. And that way they have managed to make obsolete my split personality in Twitter with my @elsua_b account, so that account is just about to hit the floor and go into a dormant status very soon.
• BlueIQ Ambassadors: This is the group of IBMers I work with on a daily basis helping accelerate the adoption rate of social software, both inside and outside of the firewall. They are all social software evangelists and a very enthusiastic bunch of folks who truly live social and who so far have been rather instrumental in helping IBM become a social business. Still with plenty of work to do, for sure, but their help has been tremendous over time, and it’s always quite a treat to keep in touch with them and learn from their experiences, shared knowledge, stories, connections, how-how, etc. etc. Thus if you are a BlueIQ Ambassador and you are reading this and we haven’t connected yet in Google Plus, reach out to me, please! I would love to have you in this Circle
• And, finally, Weak Ties: Yes, indeed, this is the last circle I have put together (Coming along from my Twitter Lists) and, as you can imagine, this is the list of folks who have added me into their circles and whom I am trying to figure out whether they would be able to make it further along on my other Circles, whether One50, Two50 or TheRest (Or any of the others for that matter!). They are the ones I check out every so often to see what they are doing, see who they converse with, who we share potentially common connections with, and who provide me with an opportunity to figure out whether we will be working together in the near future or not. This is where facilitated serendipity happens at its best, because time and time again I have been having numerous occasions where what may have appeared as a weak tie, it’s essentially a strong one when you dive through their core networks. Small worlds, indeed!

Well, I guess that this long blog post will close down, for now, the series of blog entries about my first impressions on my use of Google Plus, where the initial reaction is “It’s a keeper!“, “It’s both the aspirin and the vitamin I have been waiting for all along” and I am hoping it would be for most folks as well! From here onwards I will probably keep blogging about related topics to G+, but, more interestingly, about the inspiring and engaging conversations that are starting taking place over there, right as we speak! So if you would want to reach out and connect with me on Google Plus, here’s my Profile. Let’s connect!

The waters are lovely … Looking forward to seeing you all there!