Online communities
From WhyNotWiki
Chris Dent (2007-01-15). Chris Dent, 2007-01-15 (http://www.socialtext.net/open/index.cgi?chris_dent_2007_01_15).
All three of us agreed that it is harder for a community within a limited (but large) ecosystem (a business unit of a large corporation) to benefit from social software than it is for a community that transcends boundaries (such as the internet at large, cross divisional organizations, inter-corporation communities of practice, extranets, etc). We theorize that this is because the incentives to contribute and improve content are much different in a more closed system.It seems, but I have only limited experience to support this, that community and content improve when moving in two directions:
1. If a community is large and growing, the degree to which its participants are from diverse organizations or experiences improves quality
2. If a community is small and mostly closed, quality is enhanced by the existence or creation of a shared goal.
We've seen the latter within Socialtext company workspaces: Small project teams that create project wikis tend to create workspaces with a higher density of long lived and frequently referenced knowledge artifacts.
This is an issue that any company attempting to work in or near the poorly named [knowledge management (category)] sphere is going to have to deal with: Even if you have everyone writing in blogs every day, how do you ensure that all those stories are distilled for information that is useful tomorrow, next month, next year and five years down the road?
Some have argued that the success of Google proves that search conquers this problem. I don't buy it. Google works because google calculates at scales greater than any (?) company. Even if there were perfect search, there's still the potentially onerous burden of separating out the parts that matter from the crap in a bunch of blog postings, forums, email messages, etc.
This is where the wiki concept of gardening can be helpful. Gardening tunes up, cleans up, clarifies, extracts, contains, constrains and essentially reifies the good stuff that is present in content. It's hard though. Someone has to do it. Not something. It may need to be part of people's jobs. It might not just emerge in the closed labor world as it does in the more open social world.
The next step in making wikis excellent is to come up with two things:
1. Ways to augment the process of gardening with tools that help the discovery, extraction and naming that creates artifacts.
2. Ways to extend the purview of Wikis to include documents and content beyond the scope of the wiki page
Online communities edit (Category edit)
