Someday you might run up against this argument:
“Why can we just quickly throw together an online community and let it go? In fact, we have a number of communities that we could do that with right now.”
There are so many behavior-based problems with this I can’t see straight. But imagine that the person was in I.T. (Broad generalization…) They don’t care about the behavior of the community, they focus on the tools.
“Seriously? You want to take how much time to throw up communities when I can grab my web guy and he can have something up tomorrow?”
So, what do you say? My answer: “We have not built the framework to sustain interconnected communities.” And here are some characteristics to back you up. These are my five arguments for community unification.
One Person:Many Communities.
I, being one person, live in many communities. And I am not talking virtually but in real life. I am a part of communities defined as family, church, Boy Scouts, Jim Band Music, student, home owners association, and the list goes on and on. You, no doubt, live a similar life. But I am one person. In a virtual world within an organization I MUST be able to have one identity that is a part of these different communities.
Think about it. Try being a different person in each community. It doesn’t and won’t work in real life or virtually. (This makes me think about the guys who have multiple wives in different cities and none of them know each other, until one day…)
The framework must allow for interconnected communities.
My family is also a part of my church community. There are some in the church community that are a part of the Boy Scouts community, and others a part of the Jim Band community. Those in my student community are also a part of my professional communities. They all interconnect. If you can’t do that online, you are limiting the strength of each individual community.
The nature of the ‘world’ is the same.
We live in one world. The laws of nature don’t change. In each community the dynamics, characteristics and rules will change because there are different people. But we all breathe, we all communicate, the ground we all stand on is the same ground and it will rain and shine on us all. Those are constant.
In the virtual world, there must be consistency. Characteristics must be allowed to differ, but there must be some things that are the same – the same rules of nature online must apply across the board. We can’t expect to have different processes, different fundamental layouts, differently acting capabilities for the same function. Give the users something they can expect. This way, when they go from one community to another, they know the basic laws by which it is governed and they are the same as they community they just came from.
Discover information wherever it lives.
With disconnected communities, you can’t take advantage of intersections where communities cross.
A coworker of mine recently told me a story that really proved this point well. She was training her dog using cones for it to weave in and out of (it sounds like it is a show dog, but I know very little about dogs even though I have one). There were two rows and the cones alternated on each side as they progressed down the line. To help the dog become more agile, she, in time, brought the two rows closer and closer together until they formed one line. As this happened, the dog became much better at weaving through the cones.
This coworker also is an assistant soccer coach. They also had a drill with two lines of cones where the players would weave in and out. Then the two worlds naturally collided and she started bringing the lines closer together. The players gradually performed better. She shared this technique from her dog training ‘community’ with her soccer ‘community’ and the other coaches started doing the same thing. It was just natural.
In this case, the information lived on one community and was transfered to another. Disconnected communities cannot take advantage of this effect, at least with any degree of efficiency.
Permissions for each person must be unified.
I tried to find a great real life community example, but the perfect one escaped me. So I am going to just come out and say it: We must be able to manage permissions for all communities in one place. Imagine trying to say, “Joe can see this community, but not this one, and in this one he can view it and make comments but not create and in this one he can only view” and managing that though 4 different community management tools. Ain’t gonna happen without an excess of resources. But if it was in one place it is certainly manageable.
These are my five rules of community unification. If you have any more, let your voice be heard.
