Community building resources
Stumble It!Anyone serious about developing community, virtual or otherwise, should have a look at the excellent free resources at the Foundation for Community Encouragement originally established by Dr Scott Peck to help groups of all types work through the universal stages of community building.
The four stages of community forming as described in Peck's classic book The Different Drum are:
- PseudoCommunity
- Chaos
- Emptiness
- True Community
However Peck's process is not for the faint-hearted or those looking for a quick fix.
For some guidance on the practicalities of "virtual" community building check:
Virtual Community development as active waiting
and
Group collaboration: lessons from conflict resolution
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Bioteams Books Reviews
Mobile business applications framework
In a just published book Work Goes Mobile by Michael Lattanzi, Antti Korhonen and Vishy Gopalakrishnan, authors of Nokia’s mobility master plan, propose a very useful application profiling scheme to establish the degree to which a business could exploit mobile technologies in their broadest sense. This approach would also be very useful for establishing the support requirements for virtually networked teams.
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Related Virtual Communities Articles
Virtual communities can engage charity supporters
Just over two years ago Nick Cater, writing for The Guardian Newspaper, Virtual communities can boost charities, suggested that Internet-based group tools offered charities and voluntary organisations an important new channel to re-energise the engagement with their staff, supporters and clients. He also noted that this could require significant investment in time and resources. It would be interesting to see how much, 2 years on, charities have exploited this opportunity?
What virtual organisations can learn from linux communities
I came across an interesting paper, Management and Virtual Decentralised Networks: The Linux Project, published in First Monday in October 2001 by George Dafermos as part of his Masters Programme in Management at Durham Business School in the UK.
Howard Rheingold: Way-new collaboration
Howard Rheingold talks on www.TED.com about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group.
The FCE site has some good information, but updates to the site seem to have stopped a few years ago. There are some references to activity having been moved to Community Crossroads, but activity there seems to have also stopped. Did the community building effort fail to reach a critical mass to continue? Or did the activity move some place else?