Wenger, Etienne, & McDermott, Richard, & Snyder, William M. (2002). The Mature Stages of Development. In Cultivating Communities of Practice (chap 5). Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Submitted by LizBlankenship on Tue, 01/29/2008 - 17:14.
0
points
This chapter illustrated the necessity of having flexibility about the growth of a community - and also making sure to keep the community values in mind. I liked the example of the six engineers who just didn't show up when their community had grown too fast with too many newbies vying for a piece of the action. It's important to keep both new people and the core important community members happy to have a successful community. That means knowing what the value of the community is to different types of members and accomodating them - or splitting the community into multiple groups when necessary.
I too appreciated the example of the six engineers who turned rogue when they didn't like the direction that their community was heading. For me, this example pointed back to the Kim reading for this week. The six formed an implied subgroup, the hardcore veterans. The community no longer seemed to suit their needs, and so they split, which Kim poses as a threat of subgroups.
As Liz suggests, a steady combination of flexibility and vision are important to the success of a community. Vision and consistency is important to keep long-term members content, however flexibility is also important to satisfy not only the needs of newcomers, but also the changing demands of long-term members. Flexibility and focus, as exemplified specifically in the (Stage 3) Maturing section of Wenger et al, correlate to fostering/promoting subgroups, while maintaining an overarcing identity to encourage loyalty.
Submitted by John Blair on Wed, 01/30/2008 - 00:23.
0
points
John Blair
I enjoyed this reading. I was struck by the one example where a community refused a management request to become a "review committee". I wonder how often this could successfully be done in the corporate world - especially if the meetings are taking place on company time. Does the communtiy remain true to it's purpose or does it take on requests from outsiders and newbies? Quite the dilemma.
Can a community establish itself within an oganization for the purpose of exchanging / developing better methods of achieving tasks for the organization, then survive it's own success when asked to perform other activities that fall outside their domain or core purpose?
Wenger et al, express numerous ways to do this through redefining the communities role within the organization, expanding boundaries, and taking "stewardship" seriously.
I just wonder if those core members that start such a community would be interested in doing these activities? If they were, wouldn't that be part of their core purpose from the beginning to become a knowledge management function, embracing the mentoring of newbies, workshops, leadership turnover, etc, etc, etc.?
The authors focus on methods to do so, and offer at the end rationale's why communtiies don't sustain themselves, but I still wonder how realistic it is within an business organization to have a community evolve through the described sustainability life cycle and still remain true to it's core purpose.
This chapter was looking at the evolution perspective of communities. It detailed each stages in a community life and some possible solutions for the problems people may face in the stages. It is interesting to think about thie perspective of online communities.
For examples;
1) most online communities fade rather quicker than normal communities: does this mean that the bonds that bring people together are more frail or because it is easy for people to join another new emergent community?
2) It seems even harder to control the community (e.g., making it keeping on the focus) because distance matters. For instance, newbies were afraid of asking or raising some questions because they did not if it was proper, however, in online communities, this can be largely eliminated since people would have less concern, because they don't face eachh other and they are under some identity which is not neccesarily much relevant to the real person.
3) Online communities have advantages in knowledge maintaining and meeting method designs, due to the abilities of IT.
4) onlline communities, since involve more distributed membership, it is a question for who is responsible for cultivating the community. We see most online-communities are business driven; so there would naturally be goal-conflict: for example, the owner of the website wants to brings as many as possible people thus to earn "eyes" for money, which can seriously controdict with the community need-tokeep focus.
This Chapter, Wenger et al focus on problems a community may encounter at a more matured stage. It seems that the main design goal of this chapter is “Help communities grow, change their relationships to their domain, and truly integrate with the organization as a whole.” (P.96)
At a maturing stage, the problem is focus vs. expand. When a community grows rapidly, it often shift tone from cutting-edge issues to basic ones and make old timers get bored. Wenger et al provided a work plan, which can be seen as design alternatives, to solve the problem, such that identify gaps in knowledge and develop a learning agenda, refine community boundaries, and reutilize entry requirements and processes.
At a stewardship stage, the problem is ownership vs. openness. The design goal of this stage is to sustain the momentum of the community through the natural shifts in its practice, members, and technology etc. However, there is a tension between developing the community’s own knowledge, tools and methods vs. opening to new ideas and members. A work plan Wenger et al. provided, including rejuvenate the community, hold a renewal workshop, and develop new leadership. At the final stage, the community will transform. It may die, split or fade away.
I like this reading because it explains clearly what kind of problems/tension may emerge at different stages. It seems that authors have foreseen how a community will evolve, and then provide solutions to solve these problems. I am just curious if it is true that every community has the same life pattern: growing, maturing, stewardship and transformation. In addition, how can we identify which stage a community is located? Also, if some problems are foreseen, can we start to apply some strategies authors suggest earlier to prevent potential problems?
Submitted by Daniel Zhou on Wed, 01/30/2008 - 14:47.
1
point
Wenger et al Ch5 talks about three mature stages of development for CoP: maturing, stewardship, and transformation. For each stage, the authors identify the main challenges and tasks of domain, community and practice. The authors also provide typical work plans for the maturing and stewardship stages.
Matureing: A typical work plan
Identify gaps in knowledge and develop a learning agenda.
Define the community's role in the organization.
Redefine community boundaries
Routinize entry requirements and processes.
Measure the value of teh community.
Maintain a cutting-edge focus.
Build and organizae a knowledge repository.
A useful role: community librarian.
Stewardship:
Institutionalizing the voice of the community.
Rejuvenate the community
Hold a renewal workshop
Actively recruit new people to the core group
Develop new leadership
Mentor new members.
Seek relationships and benchmarks outside the organization.
I really enjoy this reading. In fact, I have participated in several communities before, and have seen many communities flourish, transform, or die. It's amazing to to see how much I can learn from the reading by relating the reading to my own experience.
Wenger starts to talk about the maintenance of a community in this chapter, which would be a key question for any communities searching ways to long live. The author focused on the mature stage of a community during its life cycle and also provided a typical work plan for this stage which consists of the following eight aspects: 1.Identify gaps in knowledge and develop a learning agenda. This is the stage during which communities continue to refine their domain. 2.Define community's role in the organization. I feel like this is only applicable to a community that is affiliated with an organization. 3. Redefine community boundries. By reading the other charpter from Wenger, it helps to understand the author's definition and arguments on boundries. 4. Routinize entry requirements and the process. This is extremely important for new comers as well as to maintain well-established relationships. And This is also a pretty straightforward and obvious point to argue. 5. Measure the value of the community. 6. Maintain the cutting-edge focus. And coordinator should work to keep close connect with core members to make sure their needs are continuously successfully met. 7. Build and organize a knowledge repository. Wenger continued to argue pretty strongly about the importance of a community librarian's role. The next stage he talked about is stewardship and again a typical work plan is provided which also consists of seven steps. I feel like to mentor the new member is intuitively important and the last one to seek benchmarks outside organization applies in a certain boundary as well.
In this chapter Wenger describes the needs of a matured community of practice. The constant influx of new members will change the community's focus. Similarly the energy levels within the community will constantly change. Hence helping the matured communities sustain themselves is a goal for community managers.
Some of the design alternatives suggested to meet this goal are:
Articulating the community's boundary, in other words, making it clear for newcomers about the knowledge gaps they need to bridge in order to become a part of the community. Related designs are having a learning agenda, routinizing entry process.
Having a community librarian. Large and formal communities develop knowledge repository that need to be managed. Depending on the size of this repository it can become necessary to hire a dedicated librarian to organize, annotate the repository.
The Staple Removers are world famous staple experts. Their community of practice reached the stewardship phase when community librarian Milton made an emergency stapler repair at an Office Space fan convention. Everyone knew the Removers were hot, and everyone wanted in.
But community leader Franz wouldn't have it. Their boundaries were set - their focus was clear: cutting-edge stapler repair. Thousands of newcomers? No thanks. But event organizer Ricardo didn't agree. He quoted Wenger Chapter 5, page 105: "Openness… involves actively soliciting new ideas, new members, and new leadership to bring fresh vitality into the community." How could the Removers stay cutting-edge without some new voices? Franz considered and so began Stage 4.
With entry requirements routine and a knowledge repository organized into flexible taxonomies (thanks Milton), Ricardo put on a stapler bash to remember. New members were assigned mentors so they would develop alongside long-term members and the burden of mentoring would be spread among the community.
Yet Franz wasn't convinced. He knew widening their boundaries risked diluting focus (p109). Would the Removers suffer a Stage 5 demise? Maybe, but with the power of Wenger at least they stand a chance.
I'm only responding to this out of a sign of respect, not because I have anything thematic to add to it. This was a really funny and insightful posting. You easily get my vote this week.
I'm a bit surprised no one has brought up yet that this was Chapter 5 even though Chapter 4 comes next in chronological order AND the link at the top signifies this as Chapter 4. Perhaps it was an oversight, perhaps there is a more subtle reason we moved direclty into mature communities this week. Either way, the authors' main point dovetailed excellently with Wenger's other Chapter 4 this week, mainly by discussing boundaries and continuing his discussion of inside/outside and members/nonmembers.
Specifically, this focus was repeated in the theme and quote, "tension between a community's sense of ownership and its openness to new ideas and people" (109). This complements his earlier discussion of boundaries by acknowleding that boundaries (a sense of belonging, intimacy, core purposes, etc.) are ncessary while also nodding towards bridges--or perhaps peepholes would be a better visual--as a necessary and beneficial way of maintaining an aging community. The authors get at this when they write, "to remain vibrant, communities need to shift topics along with the market, invite new members, forge new alliances, and constantly redefine their boundaries" (105). This goes beyond simply looking in the mirror as outsiders would, and although the authors bring up strategies of brining in outside speakers to recharge the community, i think the lesson here is in paying attention to negative space.
Great sculptures are often judged by the plaster or bronze they are shaped into, but also in the play of empty space or gaps (perhaps in a figure's raised arm, an animal's arched back, etc.) to evaluate their worth. Likewise, Foucault says we can only understand what literature is by understanding what it is not. Communities are the same way. We know more about what Facebook is because we know what it isn't in comparison to MySpace (mainly loud and annoying), but there are examples beyond from Yahoo! to code help sites. I think this chapter does a very nice job about acknowledging boundaries not was barriers, but as check-in moments that put the often insular community into perspective.
I'm not sure I agree that as communities mature, they necessarily must lead to having a comprehensive body of knowledge. While it would be useful for the incoming members, I think a community that simply continues to discuss their practice in cutting edge terms would be useful. As long as the newcomers don't expect too much from the core group, and the core group isn't bothered by the newcomers, I think a community could still continue doing what it does in the beginning stages.
Maybe I'm confused with what Wenger et alia is suggesting, but it seems as though they're saying that a community must change as it grows larger.
Submitted by Matt Adamo on Thu, 01/31/2008 - 14:56.
1
point
This reading applied/refocused many of the ideas from last week's readings to the goal of maintaining a maturing community. Some that stood out to me were:
- "routinizing entry requirements," or what Kim might call establishing a welcoming ritual
- the conflict between ownership and openness is also addressed more generally in Wenger et al ch. 3, where they suggest valuable input can come from inside and outside the community
- the suggestions for sustaining a community's energy applied many of the design ideas in Kim's Events chapter (i.e. supplier presentations, meetings with other communities, developing leadership, etc...)
There's an interesting parallel between what Wenger says in this chapter about the domain, community, and practice issues at the stage of Maturation and the ideas of reification and boundary objects in his other book.
Wenger identifies the key issue in Maturation regarding practice is to move beyond simply sharing ideas to systemitically identify its practice. This is the idea of reification - taking the knowledge that's being shared and turning into shared knowledge.
Wenger also says that in this stage, communities must define their role in the organization, its relationships with other domains. Here we see the role of boundary object. The shared knowledge is embodied in stories or artifacts (reified knowledge), some of which will become boundary objects. These boundary objects are touchstones for the community to recognize how it fits together and how it fits in with the larger organizations/domains.
Submitted by Tracy Liu on Thu, 01/31/2008 - 21:31.
1
point
This chapter discussed the problems that the community of practice will face when it is in “Midlife” and how to solve these problems.
First the authors point out the participation rate in a community which we can refer to Kraut’s model, for instance, as Kraut claims that the contribution/participation is determined by how members appreciate this work and how they evaluate their contribution in this work.
Second, the tension between the needs of core members and new members is illustrated as the problem of “focus and expand”, I am wondering whether the difference between their demand would diminish in the long run and converge to the same as new members would become core members in future.
In the stage of stewardship, one suggestion is “develop new leadership” and I am wondering who could have this authority to change the leadership in one community. For another suggestion about “seek relationships and benchmarks outside the organization”, would the cost of doing this be very high due to inter-group discrimination?
In this article Wenger lays out the steps involved in stewarding a more mature community. One of main components of this article was that as a community matures the focus switches from establishing values to clarifying focus, role and boundaries. He goes on to state that for a community to remain relevant for their domain the community needs an influx of ideas, approaches and relations. To me these two goals seem to be at odds with each other.
It is clear that for a community to maintain the interest of its members, and add new members, it must continue to stay current. However, since these are communities of practice, it seems that staying current may mean changing their practice. This undoubtedly leads to tension between those that want to introduce new ideas, which may change the practice, and those that have an idea of how the practice should be considered. It seems like this tension is bound to occur in communities. Maybe this is an example of a good time for a new subgroups form?
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
I guess when a Community of Practice needs to stay current, it doesnt necessarily need to change their practice, but create subspecialities, sort of like CoP of medical doctors starting from general practitioners, then specializing into various fields, and even further into subfields, etc to stay current. But yes, they can also innovate to stay currrent, such as community of engineers creating new fields, but it could be a specialization as well. (This is a circular argument)
I thought this reading is a bit like Kim's in terms of the community growth path, and what to do to control the evolution.
In this chapter of the Wenger et al. reading, the authors first share a story of how a small community with a very specific emphasis gradually "evolved". As the community grew in popularity, it eventually become one of the leading experts in their speciality/field, expanding the communities focus to include multiple related topics. Wenger et al. continue to explain that communities are constantly growing. To name a few examples, sub-groups may be formed, new members may bring new insights, and communities interests may shift. This leads us to the authors' primary discussion on the "maturing, stewardship, and transformation" stages of communities.
Maturing stage: Community is concerned about clarifying its identity, or more specifically, its focus, role and boundaries. Something that I found interesting was the discussion on whether a community should "focus" or "expand". A common characteristic of a mature community is that the old-timers seem to know each other, creating a sense of familiarity. The introduction of new members sometimes disrupts the ebb and flow of the community. Wenger et al. proposes several best practices for communities to consider as they begin to encounter such a mature phase. In my opinion, recognizing gaps in knowledge and level of expertise of community members is the single most important thing to consider. After all, the entire mismatch occurs when a community begins to attract new users who obviously, are not as familiar, or on the same level of understanding of the community's focus and culture.
Finally, in the transformation stage, communities are described to ultimately, die and fade away, split up or merge with another community, or become institutionalized. At first glance, I felt that this was a little bit too simplified because I would never consider some of the e-communities that I participate in to be dead, split-up, or institutionalized. However, on second thought, perhaps I have simply became so accustomed to the small community that I did not realize anything strange when I only saw the same people, day after day.
Herein Wenger discusses the shift from Growth to Maturation using a biologically inspired metaphor.
We take a walk through three stages:
Stage 3: Maturing
Stage 4: Stewardship
Stage 5: Transformation
These stages make me wonder about Convalescence? Senility? It is interesting at the end that Wenger et al mention community endings....
Actually, I have seen much of this in my lego community. The shift from problem-solving to the exploration of subtleties and nuances of technique. Moreover, this exploration of nuance and technique meant boundary-breaking, which then precipitated a full-scale crisis in which the community forked and a number of members took themselves elsewhere. In some eyes, the still-extant community is a band of core hard-liners unwilling to adapt, whereas to the still-insiders they succeeded at preserving their core commitments and values in the face of community degradation. Which is the case? Depends on who you are.
It is for this reason, in fact, that I am unwilling to accept that communities must all use the same definition of success, or, more to the point, that success is even possible to define. Communities change, and everyone has a different perspective on what the community "succeeded" at doing. Even a dead community succeeds at serving the needs of its users, i.e. when it no longer does so, it succeeds at getting out of the way.
Community is much to complex to lay out a universal teleology to which all must subscribe.
-------------------------------------------------------- PHartzog@umich.edu
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The Universe is made up of stories, not atoms.
--Muriel Rukeyser
I think the survival of transitioning communities in rough times often rests heavily on the "core members" discussed in Wenger et al Ch.5 , the couple of people who relentlessly persist in nagging everyone else to maintain their role....
I am grateful for these people in communities which I have taken part in.. particular during work I've done in disaster response off-line, where falling apart after an exhausting reflief effort as a group is much more comfortable than trying to process the rapid bouts of crisis and change we had just collectively experienced together...
In the groups in which I have played a key role, many members have had a love/hate relationship with these persistent folks, on the one hand grateful that they are taking up the slack when others fall off, and on the other resentful that they themselves didn't feel motivated to play a similar role...
Wenger et al do a great job of encapsulating the necessary steps of development that will help a community reach Maturity.
However, if the benefits of developing well run communities are among many, to gain legitimacy in the eyes of a company and its workers (i.e. chemcial engineering community of 17 members who developed a process for collective bragaining that ultimately lowered the cost of procuring chemicals to 1/3 the original cost(s) pp.101) why aren't such communities widely known about? this surely cant be a new found way of managing? I had never heard of communities of this sort prior to this class? Are they still underground? Or are they so new school that the old schoolers who are still at the helm of most Fortune 100/500 companies not hip to this? They should be because knowledge sharing is the present future!
Mature communities will, at some point, stagnate or as Wenger, et al say: "go through cycles of high and low energy. (p. 106)". Rejuvenation is the fix for what ails the floundering community!
Obviously, there are a number of ways to rejuvenate communities. As I mentioned in the previous post on Kim, some communities start to languish due to the lack of new ideas. The boundaries become too rigid/too concrete and there is no movement in or out. I chuckled as I read Wenger's recommendation to "hold a renewal workshop." It seems, perhaps, a bit contrived but certainly an all-hands-on-deck meeting at least shows the awareness that not all is well within the community and something needs to change.
Another recommendation is to recruit new people, which seems like an obvious choice to help rejuvenate. Strangely enough, Wenger seems to ignore the importance of brokers in the rejuvenation process (after making a strong case for them in the "Communities of Practice" book). Brokers bring fresh ideas from other domains and communities with necessarily changing the makeup of the community. Obviously, it may be desirable to change up a community, but brokers may provide a quick fix when communities need some rejuvenating, whether it be the ideas, people, practices.
Submitted by Satyendra on Sat, 02/02/2008 - 17:55.
2
points
In this reading Wenger focusses on problems that occur as a community matures from its nascent stages to a more mature stage. I like the way the reading weaves in both theoretical aspects with real life examples.
The inherent tension that a community faces on the decision between focussing on its core members to expanding can be hard to manage - and a substaintial amount of the community managers' time can be
spent in trying to manage that tension. On expanding, the inclusion of new members can bring about a tension in the goals, visions and knowledge levels of the participants.
However, the reading also gives us design guidelines which we can use to manage those tensions. For example one of the goals the readings mentions is:
Design Goal :Identifying knowledge gaps - which can be a really healthy process for the community because it can induce a more honest discussion of community's needs and build identity.
Method: Pursuing an explicit learning agenda by commissioning members to explore a new topic, idea, create guidelines or identify different approaches to practice can be one way to identiy and navigate a way to bridge the knowledge gap.
This can be one way which helps identify the knowledge gap and lead us to steps that we can take to transition new members through a smoother learning of those goals.
Another design goal is to: Rejuvenate the community:
A Design claim made in the reading is that "changing the rhythm of interactions of the community once they begin to become too predictable can rejuvenate the community"
One way to do that is to try to encourage real world interactions among sub groups of the community who can meet or perhaps to introduce new exciting topics into the community
which are different from the usual ones discussed there and can generate increased interest from the community. There are other design goals mentioned such as maintaing the balance between
openness and ownership. These goals are important and we can see them in most of our communities and in general on communities on the web like Digg. For example a changed algorithm for digg
recently stirred up quite a discussion between members who had been there for quite a while and newer members. Having a framework of options to choose from while dealing with such situations can be of immense help!
While reading this excerpt by Wenger, I found myself constantly comparing it to our reading from last week on the CSS-D community - both readings focus around how to balance the needs of newcomers versus old-timers, in order to keep the community active.
Wenger says "When a community grows rapidly, it shifts tone". More than this, I would say, when a community grows, it becomes more fragmented. Mainly, this is into two groups with different needs: the group of newcomers wants to learn and be accepted by the core group, who they look up to and want to become part of. The core group, however, wants to stay focused on high-level, 'cutting-edge' issues, not waste all their time mentoring and explaining their practices to newcomers. This is a real problem. As Wenger says, "New members ask different questions, have different needs, and have not established the same relationships and trust as the core group." For core members, growth disrupts, and threatens the intimacy and sense of identity that they like about the group.
Wenger spends the rest of the chapter outlining ways to solve this quandary. His overall view is that as communities evolve, a certain amound of restructuing and redefining of community boundaries is necessary. Most of all, communities of practice *need* strong leadership to remain in place, to keep the community focused and active. Too much turnover or lack of focus can end a group. (As can 'turning into a social club' - a funny comment that shows that CoP are really all busines, no pleasure.) The main recommendations I get from this?
Recruit new members, especially people you think will help the CoP
Develop new leadership to ease turnover
Mentor new members
But, keep a 'cutting-edge' focus - mentoring and basic issues should be kept to a minimum, so that the CoP is as effective as possible.
Wenger highlights a focus on stewardship as one of the transformational stages of mature communities, and this has been a critical, if not always successful stage in my experience with online communites.
At some point, people recognize that it takes considerable effort just to maintain momentum inside a community -- original founders get fatigued with handling mundane details, and often their replacements lack the drive to keep the community up to its original intentions.
My community of interest for this course, PerlMonks, took an interesting approach to this problem by giving users who had attained a certain level of contribution (900 or more upvotes on their comments) the ability to moderate discussion and vote among themselves on content edits and removals. This seems to be a fairly elegant way to bring new blood in to the community administration, and keep the site well groomed. I look forward to investigating how well this particular mechanism.
flexibility in growth
This chapter illustrated the necessity of having flexibility about the growth of a community - and also making sure to keep the community values in mind. I liked the example of the six engineers who just didn't show up when their community had grown too fast with too many newbies vying for a piece of the action. It's important to keep both new people and the core important community members happy to have a successful community. That means knowing what the value of the community is to different types of members and accomodating them - or splitting the community into multiple groups when necessary.
re: flexibility in growth
I too appreciated the example of the six engineers who turned rogue when they didn't like the direction that their community was heading. For me, this example pointed back to the Kim reading for this week. The six formed an implied subgroup, the hardcore veterans. The community no longer seemed to suit their needs, and so they split, which Kim poses as a threat of subgroups.
As Liz suggests, a steady combination of flexibility and vision are important to the success of a community. Vision and consistency is important to keep long-term members content, however flexibility is also important to satisfy not only the needs of newcomers, but also the changing demands of long-term members. Flexibility and focus, as exemplified specifically in the (Stage 3) Maturing section of Wenger et al, correlate to fostering/promoting subgroups, while maintaining an overarcing identity to encourage loyalty.
community success vs. community purpose
John Blair
I enjoyed this reading. I was struck by the one example where a community refused a management request to become a "review committee". I wonder how often this could successfully be done in the corporate world - especially if the meetings are taking place on company time. Does the communtiy remain true to it's purpose or does it take on requests from outsiders and newbies? Quite the dilemma.
Can a community establish itself within an oganization for the purpose of exchanging / developing better methods of achieving tasks for the organization, then survive it's own success when asked to perform other activities that fall outside their domain or core purpose?
Wenger et al, express numerous ways to do this through redefining the communities role within the organization, expanding boundaries, and taking "stewardship" seriously.
I just wonder if those core members that start such a community would be interested in doing these activities? If they were, wouldn't that be part of their core purpose from the beginning to become a knowledge management function, embracing the mentoring of newbies, workshops, leadership turnover, etc, etc, etc.?
The authors focus on methods to do so, and offer at the end rationale's why communtiies don't sustain themselves, but I still wonder how realistic it is within an business organization to have a community evolve through the described sustainability life cycle and still remain true to it's core purpose.
The life cycle of online communities
This chapter was looking at the evolution perspective of communities. It detailed each stages in a community life and some possible solutions for the problems people may face in the stages. It is interesting to think about thie perspective of online communities.
For examples;
1) most online communities fade rather quicker than normal communities: does this mean that the bonds that bring people together are more frail or because it is easy for people to join another new emergent community?
2) It seems even harder to control the community (e.g., making it keeping on the focus) because distance matters. For instance, newbies were afraid of asking or raising some questions because they did not if it was proper, however, in online communities, this can be largely eliminated since people would have less concern, because they don't face eachh other and they are under some identity which is not neccesarily much relevant to the real person.
3) Online communities have advantages in knowledge maintaining and meeting method designs, due to the abilities of IT.
4) onlline communities, since involve more distributed membership, it is a question for who is responsible for cultivating the community. We see most online-communities are business driven; so there would naturally be goal-conflict: for example, the owner of the website wants to brings as many as possible people thus to earn "eyes" for money, which can seriously controdict with the community need-tokeep focus.
From Starting to Sustaining
This Chapter, Wenger et al focus on problems a community may encounter at a more matured stage. It seems that the main design goal of this chapter is “Help communities grow, change their relationships to their domain, and truly integrate with the organization as a whole.” (P.96)
At a maturing stage, the problem is focus vs. expand. When a community grows rapidly, it often shift tone from cutting-edge issues to basic ones and make old timers get bored. Wenger et al provided a work plan, which can be seen as design alternatives, to solve the problem, such that identify gaps in knowledge and develop a learning agenda, refine community boundaries, and reutilize entry requirements and processes.
At a stewardship stage, the problem is ownership vs. openness. The design goal of this stage is to sustain the momentum of the community through the natural shifts in its practice, members, and technology etc. However, there is a tension between developing the community’s own knowledge, tools and methods vs. opening to new ideas and members. A work plan Wenger et al. provided, including rejuvenate the community, hold a renewal workshop, and develop new leadership. At the final stage, the community will transform. It may die, split or fade away.
I like this reading because it explains clearly what kind of problems/tension may emerge at different stages. It seems that authors have foreseen how a community will evolve, and then provide solutions to solve these problems. I am just curious if it is true that every community has the same life pattern: growing, maturing, stewardship and transformation. In addition, how can we identify which stage a community is located? Also, if some problems are foreseen, can we start to apply some strategies authors suggest earlier to prevent potential problems?
a brief summary
Wenger et al Ch5 talks about three mature stages of development for CoP: maturing, stewardship, and transformation. For each stage, the authors identify the main challenges and tasks of domain, community and practice. The authors also provide typical work plans for the maturing and stewardship stages.
Matureing: A typical work plan
Stewardship:
I really enjoy this reading. In fact, I have participated in several communities before, and have seen many communities flourish, transform, or die. It's amazing to to see how much I can learn from the reading by relating the reading to my own experience.
Wenger starts to talk about
Wenger starts to talk about the maintenance of a community in this chapter, which would be a key question for any communities searching ways to long live. The author focused on the mature stage of a community during its life cycle and also provided a typical work plan for this stage which consists of the following eight aspects: 1.Identify gaps in knowledge and develop a learning agenda. This is the stage during which communities continue to refine their domain. 2.Define community's role in the organization. I feel like this is only applicable to a community that is affiliated with an organization. 3. Redefine community boundries. By reading the other charpter from Wenger, it helps to understand the author's definition and arguments on boundries. 4. Routinize entry requirements and the process. This is extremely important for new comers as well as to maintain well-established relationships. And This is also a pretty straightforward and obvious point to argue. 5. Measure the value of the community. 6. Maintain the cutting-edge focus. And coordinator should work to keep close connect with core members to make sure their needs are continuously successfully met. 7. Build and organize a knowledge repository. Wenger continued to argue pretty strongly about the importance of a community librarian's role. The next stage he talked about is stewardship and again a typical work plan is provided which also consists of seven steps. I feel like to mentor the new member is intuitively important and the last one to seek benchmarks outside organization applies in a certain boundary as well.
Beyond adolescence
In this chapter Wenger describes the needs of a matured community of practice. The constant influx of new members will change the community's focus. Similarly the energy levels within the community will constantly change. Hence helping the matured communities sustain themselves is a goal for community managers.
Some of the design alternatives suggested to meet this goal are:
The Power of Wenger
The Staple Removers are world famous staple experts. Their community of practice reached the stewardship phase when community librarian Milton made an emergency stapler repair at an Office Space fan convention. Everyone knew the Removers were hot, and everyone wanted in.
But community leader Franz wouldn't have it. Their boundaries were set - their focus was clear: cutting-edge stapler repair. Thousands of newcomers? No thanks. But event organizer Ricardo didn't agree. He quoted Wenger Chapter 5, page 105: "Openness… involves actively soliciting new ideas, new members, and new leadership to bring fresh vitality into the community." How could the Removers stay cutting-edge without some new voices? Franz considered and so began Stage 4.
With entry requirements routine and a knowledge repository organized into flexible taxonomies (thanks Milton), Ricardo put on a stapler bash to remember. New members were assigned mentors so they would develop alongside long-term members and the burden of mentoring would be spread among the community.
Yet Franz wasn't convinced. He knew widening their boundaries risked diluting focus (p109). Would the Removers suffer a Stage 5 demise? Maybe, but with the power of Wenger at least they stand a chance.
What a community is and what it isn't
I'm only responding to this out of a sign of respect, not because I have anything thematic to add to it. This was a really funny and insightful posting. You easily get my vote this week.
I'm a bit surprised no one has brought up yet that this was Chapter 5 even though Chapter 4 comes next in chronological order AND the link at the top signifies this as Chapter 4. Perhaps it was an oversight, perhaps there is a more subtle reason we moved direclty into mature communities this week. Either way, the authors' main point dovetailed excellently with Wenger's other Chapter 4 this week, mainly by discussing boundaries and continuing his discussion of inside/outside and members/nonmembers.
Specifically, this focus was repeated in the theme and quote, "tension between a community's sense of ownership and its openness to new ideas and people" (109). This complements his earlier discussion of boundaries by acknowleding that boundaries (a sense of belonging, intimacy, core purposes, etc.) are ncessary while also nodding towards bridges--or perhaps peepholes would be a better visual--as a necessary and beneficial way of maintaining an aging community. The authors get at this when they write, "to remain vibrant, communities need to shift topics along with the market, invite new members, forge new alliances, and constantly redefine their boundaries" (105). This goes beyond simply looking in the mirror as outsiders would, and although the authors bring up strategies of brining in outside speakers to recharge the community, i think the lesson here is in paying attention to negative space.
Great sculptures are often judged by the plaster or bronze they are shaped into, but also in the play of empty space or gaps (perhaps in a figure's raised arm, an animal's arched back, etc.) to evaluate their worth. Likewise, Foucault says we can only understand what literature is by understanding what it is not. Communities are the same way. We know more about what Facebook is because we know what it isn't in comparison to MySpace (mainly loud and annoying), but there are examples beyond from Yahoo! to code help sites. I think this chapter does a very nice job about acknowledging boundaries not was barriers, but as check-in moments that put the often insular community into perspective.
Questioning Maturity
I'm not sure I agree that as communities mature, they necessarily must lead to having a comprehensive body of knowledge. While it would be useful for the incoming members, I think a community that simply continues to discuss their practice in cutting edge terms would be useful. As long as the newcomers don't expect too much from the core group, and the core group isn't bothered by the newcomers, I think a community could still continue doing what it does in the beginning stages.
Maybe I'm confused with what Wenger et alia is suggesting, but it seems as though they're saying that a community must change as it grows larger.
Building on last week
This reading applied/refocused many of the ideas from last week's readings to the goal of maintaining a maturing community. Some that stood out to me were:
- "routinizing entry requirements," or what Kim might call establishing a welcoming ritual
- the conflict between ownership and openness is also addressed more generally in Wenger et al ch. 3, where they suggest valuable input can come from inside and outside the community
- the suggestions for sustaining a community's energy applied many of the design ideas in Kim's Events chapter (i.e. supplier presentations, meetings with other communities, developing leadership, etc...)
Wenger Meet Wenger
There's an interesting parallel between what Wenger says in this chapter about the domain, community, and practice issues at the stage of Maturation and the ideas of reification and boundary objects in his other book.
Wenger identifies the key issue in Maturation regarding practice is to move beyond simply sharing ideas to systemitically identify its practice. This is the idea of reification - taking the knowledge that's being shared and turning into shared knowledge.
Wenger also says that in this stage, communities must define their role in the organization, its relationships with other domains. Here we see the role of boundary object. The shared knowledge is embodied in stories or artifacts (reified knowledge), some of which will become boundary objects. These boundary objects are touchstones for the community to recognize how it fits together and how it fits in with the larger organizations/domains.
Middle Life of communities
This chapter discussed the problems that the community of practice will face when it is in “Midlife” and how to solve these problems.
First the authors point out the participation rate in a community which we can refer to Kraut’s model, for instance, as Kraut claims that the contribution/participation is determined by how members appreciate this work and how they evaluate their contribution in this work.
Second, the tension between the needs of core members and new members is illustrated as the problem of “focus and expand”, I am wondering whether the difference between their demand would diminish in the long run and converge to the same as new members would become core members in future.
In the stage of stewardship, one suggestion is “develop new leadership” and I am wondering who could have this authority to change the leadership in one community. For another suggestion about “seek relationships and benchmarks outside the organization”, would the cost of doing this be very high due to inter-group discrimination?
The emergence of subgroups?
In this article Wenger lays out the steps involved in stewarding a more mature community. One of main components of this article was that as a community matures the focus switches from establishing values to clarifying focus, role and boundaries. He goes on to state that for a community to remain relevant for their domain the community needs an influx of ideas, approaches and relations. To me these two goals seem to be at odds with each other.
It is clear that for a community to maintain the interest of its members, and add new members, it must continue to stay current. However, since these are communities of practice, it seems that staying current may mean changing their practice. This undoubtedly leads to tension between those that want to introduce new ideas, which may change the practice, and those that have an idea of how the practice should be considered. It seems like this tension is bound to occur in communities. Maybe this is an example of a good time for a new subgroups form?
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
-Jorge Luis Borges
Innovate to stay current
I guess when a Community of Practice needs to stay current, it doesnt necessarily need to change their practice, but create subspecialities, sort of like CoP of medical doctors starting from general practitioners, then specializing into various fields, and even further into subfields, etc to stay current. But yes, they can also innovate to stay currrent, such as community of engineers creating new fields, but it could be a specialization as well. (This is a circular argument)
I thought this reading is a bit like Kim's in terms of the community growth path, and what to do to control the evolution.
Some thoughts on Wenger et al. reading
In this chapter of the Wenger et al. reading, the authors first share a story of how a small community with a very specific emphasis gradually "evolved". As the community grew in popularity, it eventually become one of the leading experts in their speciality/field, expanding the communities focus to include multiple related topics. Wenger et al. continue to explain that communities are constantly growing. To name a few examples, sub-groups may be formed, new members may bring new insights, and communities interests may shift. This leads us to the authors' primary discussion on the "maturing, stewardship, and transformation" stages of communities.
Maturing stage: Community is concerned about clarifying its identity, or more specifically, its focus, role and boundaries. Something that I found interesting was the discussion on whether a community should "focus" or "expand". A common characteristic of a mature community is that the old-timers seem to know each other, creating a sense of familiarity. The introduction of new members sometimes disrupts the ebb and flow of the community. Wenger et al. proposes several best practices for communities to consider as they begin to encounter such a mature phase. In my opinion, recognizing gaps in knowledge and level of expertise of community members is the single most important thing to consider. After all, the entire mismatch occurs when a community begins to attract new users who obviously, are not as familiar, or on the same level of understanding of the community's focus and culture.
Finally, in the transformation stage, communities are described to ultimately, die and fade away, split up or merge with another community, or become institutionalized. At first glance, I felt that this was a little bit too simplified because I would never consider some of the e-communities that I participate in to be dead, split-up, or institutionalized. However, on second thought, perhaps I have simply became so accustomed to the small community that I did not realize anything strange when I only saw the same people, day after day.
Teleology
Herein Wenger discusses the shift from Growth to Maturation using a biologically inspired metaphor.
We take a walk through three stages:
Stage 3: Maturing
Stage 4: Stewardship
Stage 5: Transformation
These stages make me wonder about Convalescence? Senility? It is interesting at the end that Wenger et al mention community endings....
Actually, I have seen much of this in my lego community. The shift from problem-solving to the exploration of subtleties and nuances of technique. Moreover, this exploration of nuance and technique meant boundary-breaking, which then precipitated a full-scale crisis in which the community forked and a number of members took themselves elsewhere. In some eyes, the still-extant community is a band of core hard-liners unwilling to adapt, whereas to the still-insiders they succeeded at preserving their core commitments and values in the face of community degradation. Which is the case? Depends on who you are.
It is for this reason, in fact, that I am unwilling to accept that communities must all use the same definition of success, or, more to the point, that success is even possible to define. Communities change, and everyone has a different perspective on what the community "succeeded" at doing. Even a dead community succeeds at serving the needs of its users, i.e. when it no longer does so, it succeeds at getting out of the way.
Community is much to complex to lay out a universal teleology to which all must subscribe.
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PHartzog@umich.edu
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The Universe is made up of stories, not atoms.
--Muriel Rukeyser
The Role of Community Coordinators in Community Maturity
I think the survival of transitioning communities in rough times often rests heavily on the "core members" discussed in Wenger et al Ch.5 , the couple of people who relentlessly persist in nagging everyone else to maintain their role....
I am grateful for these people in communities which I have taken part in.. particular during work I've done in disaster response off-line, where falling apart after an exhausting reflief effort as a group is much more comfortable than trying to process the rapid bouts of crisis and change we had just collectively experienced together...
In the groups in which I have played a key role, many members have had a love/hate relationship with these persistent folks, on the one hand grateful that they are taking up the slack when others fall off, and on the other resentful that they themselves didn't feel motivated to play a similar role...
Lisa McLaughlin
What's the catch?
Wenger et al do a great job of encapsulating the necessary steps of development that will help a community reach Maturity.
However, if the benefits of developing well run communities are among many, to gain legitimacy in the eyes of a company and its workers (i.e. chemcial engineering community of 17 members who developed a process for collective bragaining that ultimately lowered the cost of procuring chemicals to 1/3 the original cost(s) pp.101) why aren't such communities widely known about? this surely cant be a new found way of managing? I had never heard of communities of this sort prior to this class? Are they still underground? Or are they so new school that the old schoolers who are still at the helm of most Fortune 100/500 companies not hip to this? They should be because knowledge sharing is the present future!
Rejuvenating the community
Mature communities will, at some point, stagnate or as Wenger, et al say: "go through cycles of high and low energy. (p. 106)". Rejuvenation is the fix for what ails the floundering community!
Obviously, there are a number of ways to rejuvenate communities. As I mentioned in the previous post on Kim, some communities start to languish due to the lack of new ideas. The boundaries become too rigid/too concrete and there is no movement in or out. I chuckled as I read Wenger's recommendation to "hold a renewal workshop." It seems, perhaps, a bit contrived but certainly an all-hands-on-deck meeting at least shows the awareness that not all is well within the community and something needs to change.
Another recommendation is to recruit new people, which seems like an obvious choice to help rejuvenate. Strangely enough, Wenger seems to ignore the importance of brokers in the rejuvenation process (after making a strong case for them in the "Communities of Practice" book). Brokers bring fresh ideas from other domains and communities with necessarily changing the makeup of the community. Obviously, it may be desirable to change up a community, but brokers may provide a quick fix when communities need some rejuvenating, whether it be the ideas, people, practices.
Handling Change
In this reading Wenger focusses on problems that occur as a community matures from its nascent stages to a more mature stage. I like the way the reading weaves in both theoretical aspects with real life examples.
The inherent tension that a community faces on the decision between focussing on its core members to expanding can be hard to manage - and a substaintial amount of the community managers' time can be
spent in trying to manage that tension. On expanding, the inclusion of new members can bring about a tension in the goals, visions and knowledge levels of the participants.
However, the reading also gives us design guidelines which we can use to manage those tensions. For example one of the goals the readings mentions is:
Design Goal :Identifying knowledge gaps - which can be a really healthy process for the community because it can induce a more honest discussion of community's needs and build identity.
Method: Pursuing an explicit learning agenda by commissioning members to explore a new topic, idea, create guidelines or identify different approaches to practice can be one way to identiy and navigate a way to bridge the knowledge gap.
This can be one way which helps identify the knowledge gap and lead us to steps that we can take to transition new members through a smoother learning of those goals.
Another design goal is to: Rejuvenate the community:
A Design claim made in the reading is that "changing the rhythm of interactions of the community once they begin to become too predictable can rejuvenate the community"
One way to do that is to try to encourage real world interactions among sub groups of the community who can meet or perhaps to introduce new exciting topics into the community
which are different from the usual ones discussed there and can generate increased interest from the community. There are other design goals mentioned such as maintaing the balance between
openness and ownership. These goals are important and we can see them in most of our communities and in general on communities on the web like Digg. For example a changed algorithm for digg
recently stirred up quite a discussion between members who had been there for quite a while and newer members. Having a framework of options to choose from while dealing with such situations can be of immense help!
Evolving communities
While reading this excerpt by Wenger, I found myself constantly comparing it to our reading from last week on the CSS-D community - both readings focus around how to balance the needs of newcomers versus old-timers, in order to keep the community active.
Wenger says "When a community grows rapidly, it shifts tone". More than this, I would say, when a community grows, it becomes more fragmented. Mainly, this is into two groups with different needs: the group of newcomers wants to learn and be accepted by the core group, who they look up to and want to become part of. The core group, however, wants to stay focused on high-level, 'cutting-edge' issues, not waste all their time mentoring and explaining their practices to newcomers. This is a real problem. As Wenger says, "New members ask different questions, have different needs, and have not established the same relationships and trust as the core group." For core members, growth disrupts, and threatens the intimacy and sense of identity that they like about the group.
Wenger spends the rest of the chapter outlining ways to solve this quandary. His overall view is that as communities evolve, a certain amound of restructuing and redefining of community boundaries is necessary. Most of all, communities of practice *need* strong leadership to remain in place, to keep the community focused and active. Too much turnover or lack of focus can end a group. (As can 'turning into a social club' - a funny comment that shows that CoP are really all busines, no pleasure.) The main recommendations I get from this?
On Community Stewardship
Wenger highlights a focus on stewardship as one of the transformational stages of mature communities, and this has been a critical, if not always successful stage in my experience with online communites.
At some point, people recognize that it takes considerable effort just to maintain momentum inside a community -- original founders get fatigued with handling mundane details, and often their replacements lack the drive to keep the community up to its original intentions.
My community of interest for this course, PerlMonks, took an interesting approach to this problem by giving users who had attained a certain level of contribution (900 or more upvotes on their comments) the ability to moderate discussion and vote among themselves on content edits and removals. This seems to be a fairly elegant way to bring new blood in to the community administration, and keep the site well groomed. I look forward to investigating how well this particular mechanism.
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oostendo@umich.edu
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