Thinking About Our Community
From KM4DevWiki
Contents |
Why should we think about our community?
- When something upsets people, when we notice discomfort, when we are at a loss at how to proceed, it is useful to move from our individual perspectives and try to see the issue through the eyes of the larger community.
- When something is really wonderful, useful, productive, beyond our celebration and enjoyment, it is useful to examine "what went right."
Brainstorm: Ideas to help us "see" ourselves as a community
- Consensus on purpose and principles
Groundrules?
- Do we think we need a few bare groundrules at KM4Dev? If yes, what might they be?
- What is in place already?
- Will the ground rules facilitate respect, openness, honesty, understanding, listening and trust?
Nelly suggested: Sharing, Respect, Diversity, Visibility and Transparency. Those would be some values I would propose for km4dev.org.
The Mailing List Environment: Guidelines and Principles
The Mailing List Environment is intended to provide information on the following aspects of the KM4Dev discussion list:
- Orientation
- Ways to promoting dialogue
- Support
- Concerns and/or issues
KM4Dev Core Group
The KM4Dev Core Group is made up of a subset of volunteers from the KM4Dev community. The Core Group supports the community in a number of ways. Led by KM4Dev's main facilitator, Lucie Lamoureux, the core group provides ideas and suggestions to hosts of KM4Dev f2f events, addresses situations that arise on the mailing list, discusses technical issues related to the website and strategizes on future funding modalities.
The Core Group meets (approximately) 2-3 times a year, virtually, and piggybacks f2f events when possible. KM4Dev Core group meeting notes are recorded and shared with the community.
If you are interested in joining the KM4Dev Core Group, please contact Lucie at llamoureux AT (@) bellanet.org.
Notes from Informal Gatherings
- KM4Dev GK3 Meeting: December 12, 2007
Useful pointers and references
From the Com-Prac list (a yahoo group on communities of practice) from a post by Miguel Cornejo thinking about how to look at the health of a community.
My own private definition is quite informal. We evaluate roughly:
- Does it have a stable and proficient facilitator / moderator team, coming from the CoP members?
- Does it have frequent, healthy interactions (new threads and answers, meetings, other)?
- Do questions get answered? All of them, and fast?
- Is there a clear understanding of household rules? Or conversely, are there frequent problems?
- Is the "target public" aware of the existence and operation of the CoP?
- Are the CoP goals under way, at least? Does the CoP produce the expected knowledge objects?
- Does the CoP show signs of independent life, such as initiatives, projects and proposals started and driven by grass-root members?
Without any one of those, it would be either a non-mature community, or a sick and past-its-prime one needing work... or pruning.
It's not a matter of membership size or of number of topics. There's support forums with millions of registered members and less than a tenth of the activity and purpose of much smaller ones. And there's narrow topics where not many messages are still inmensely valuable.
Best regards,
Miguel (I'll get a URL to reference the message ASAP)
