Tacit Knowledge, Communities, & The Power of Pull

by Rachel Happe on August 20, 2010

This week we were fortunate to have John Hagel join our members to discuss his latest book, The Power of Pull.  One of the markers of a good book is that everyone who reads it gets something different out of it and TheCR Network members found a wide variety of topics that sparked their thinking, including:

  • Why passion is emerging as such a critical performance asset for individuals
  • The evolution of knowledge stocks to knowledge flows that are always changing
  • The ability to influence how serendipity happens and increase its productivity
  • The importance of constant innovation in today’s organizations
  • The critical element of trust that is required to learn and innovate quickly

What really hit a cord for me was the importance of recognizing, encouraging, and respecting what is tacit knowledge today because of its critical role in innovation.  Tacit, unspoken knowledge is the beginning point for new knowledge creation and with it, innovation. John points out that tacit knowledge – created at an organization’s edges – is unformed, sometimes inarticulate, and hard to communicate.  The people with tacit knowledge are often discounted because they cannot articulate a polished and fully formed concept.  This is where trust becomes so important.  If someone we trust comes to us with a new idea, but one that is not fully formed, we are much more likely to take them seriously and really listen to it then to dismiss it. So relationships are key to the discovery and evolution of tacit knowledge.

For me – the discussion of the nature of tacit knowledge gets to the heart of why communities are becoming so valuable in today’s environment.  Communities are what enable individuals within organizations to form trust-based relationships with people outside of the organization.  The trust relationships that form allow rapidly evolving tacit knowledge to be discussed, refined, and combined in ways that allow an organization to rapidly take advantage of the new opportunities the knowledge creates.  Those organizations that can more effectively build communities will benefit disproportionately from the newest information in ways that more closed off organizations cannot. In a world where the speed of information is increasing daily, this competency will drive huge value creation for those that can harness it and it begs the question: what is your community strategy?

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Drupal Commons – Open Source Social Business?

by Jim Storer on August 9, 2010

Late last week we heard about a new offering from Acquia, an open source software company focused on the Drupal social publishing system and a partner of The Community Roundtable.

The product is called Drupal Commons and it’s focused on expanding the use of Drupal in business. This is an interesting development because it may force proprietary community platforms to re-think their pricing models. Drupal Commons is free. Yes, Acquia will offer a host of value-added services, but the total cost of ownership should be dramatically lower than with proprietary solutions.

Drupal already powers robust communities like Intel’s Atom Developer Program, Novell’s Solution Provider Community and Intuit’s Quickbase Community, so it’s not like Drupal Commons is starting from scratch.

We spoke with the folks over at Acquia and what impressed us the most is that they understand that technology is just a piece of equation in building a vibrant, successful community. Our Community Maturity Model makes sense to them. Keeping your eye on all eight competencies (of which one is technology) is essential if you want to be be successful.

So if you’re trying to do more with less and want a proven community platform, you might want to check out Drupal Commons. You can try out an instance on the Acquia site or sign up for a webcast happening later this week to learn more.

Once you’ve had a chance to kick the tires, we’d love to hear what you think in the comments.

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A Community Vacation

by Rachel Happe on August 6, 2010

This morning when I peeked in at my Facebook stream, I saw this:

[It's a grainy screen shot but reads: Dear Fan, it's summer time and also Nutella® fan page will be on vacation for the next weeks. Our wall will be closed until September 1st. You might want to come back in September to find out our new activities and all surprises we are preparing for you! Enjoy your summer with Nutella®...]

It struck me as bold for a brand to just take a vacation but thinking about it more, why not? After all brands – and their Facebook pages – are run by people like you and I… who like our vacations.  It helps that Nutella’s primary market is Europe and culturally most people take the entire month off so a brand doing so is likely to be more acceptable but vacations are a reality of most people’s work lives. I then got to thinking about communities and some recent calls we’ve done with community managers of periodic communities – FAWM and Movember – and thought about how energized both of those communities were.  Vacations, breaks, and sabbaticals are not just wasted time to be begrudgingly given to people as a benefit to them. Especially in creative disciplines (and by that I mean any information/content/management discipline), people need time to reflect, pause, and consolidate their thinking in order to be energized and engaged in the next task or challenge.

Communities, like individuals, can’t keep up a frenetic pace week in and week out – no matter how interesting the content, the monotony of the activity can cause people to glaze over and tune out.  At The Community Roundtable we’ve addressed that by switching our regular programming during the summer to book discussions and TheCR Summer Camp – essentially different types of activities that mix in a bit of off-topic fun.  We hope that helps focus members when they re-engage in the fall.  The Nutella post got me thinking though… maybe we need to plan a vacation too.

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Conversations with Community Managers – Alex Plant (NetApp)

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Enteprise 2.0 Conference 2010: You Say Social Media, I Say Community – Does It Matter?

Enterprise 2.0 is coming up next week and it is one of the events I look forward to every year for a wide variety of reasons – the programming, the people it attracts, and the innovative use of technologies they use as part of the conference all make it stand out.  Over the past few [...]

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