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At HP, we had a strategy for communities that included:

Establish three tiers of communities: professions (the most formal for our roles such as project manager), solution practice communities (for our service offerings), and specialty forums (for communities of interest).
Nurture community leaders with regular con calls for idea sharing.
Formally manage threaded discussion forums to avoid redundancy, weed out inactive ones, ensure growth in subscribers and posts, and monitor discussions to ensure that questions are answered.

The measurements established for professions were:
  1. Number of people enrolled
  2. Number of professional certifications
  3. Number of mentors and mentees
  4. Number of white papers published and read
  5. Number of training and community events
  6. Overall health rating (green, yellow, red)
We measured threaded discussion forums as follows:
  1. Number of Forums
  2. Number of Subscriptions
  3. Number of New Threads
  4. Number of Replies
  5. Total Number of Posts
  6. Number of Participants
  7. % of Population Participating
  8. Overall health rating (healthy, in danger, dead)
The moderators of forums in danger were coached on how to get their forums healthy. Dead forums (those with no activity for a month) were given one month to become active, and were deleted after two months of inactivity.

There were related posts by Bill Ives and James Robertson. And here are three replies from members of the SIKM Leaders Community.

From Sanjay Swarup: Here are some of my experiences at Ford Motor Company where I supported and managed 54 CoPs:
For any CoP to survive/thrive, the role of an active executive sponsor is vital. Minimum monthly CoP health checks are a must, as is providing timely rewards and recognition, especially in the presence of peers of the CoP members.
A community administrator/gatekeeper needs to be a person who is active in the community, well respected by community members, and considered a subject matter expert. Managers typically did not make good gatekeepers since they were overwhelmed by other responsibilities.
A community focal point/contact at each site/location must also be active in the community and considered a subject matter expert.
Establishing metrics in the knowledge input form is critical. Ideally, metrics should be quantitative; however, qualitative metrics are acceptable. A metrics input field needs to be mandatory.
Some of the key reasons why I had to close down some CoPs:
The executive sponsor was inactive.
Users did not see the value of the knowledge being shared.
CoP usage was not integrated into the corporate procedures, and CoP performance metrics were not tied to individual performance goals.

From Katrina Pugh: I agree with the regular meeting and tiers. Here are the BKMs (best known methods) we’ve generated over the last year of our CoPs program:
Requires role clarity for the community, and for community members and leaders. (Best in the form of a charter).
Leadership and facilitation are keys. Need a networker between community meetings and team leads to represent stakeholders (e.g., one person from business unit, one person from geography).
CoPs are considered effective and value-added only when they become self-managed by the practitioners (e.g., practitioners contribute to agenda, lead discussion topics and working groups).
Need to establish a rapport explicitly, by using facilitation techniques and offline meetings or check-ins with participants. Expect to storm before you norm!
Must have ground rules (e.g., meetings, forums, email).
Need a method for new member on-boarding (e.g., what’s the CoPs charter, how to get onto the workspace, when meetings take place, expectations of participants).
Communities have a predictable lifecycle. Need to measure and continuously improve (e.g., measuring membership, participation in meetings, hits, documents shared, productivity of working groups).
Use technology effectively  must be easy to integrate into life (e.g., effective use of workspace, threaded discussion, Live Meeting tapes, wikis).
Community must get and give recognition (e.g., sponsors visible, participants publicly recognized, good or improved measures reported).

From Andrew Gent: You may find this presentation interesting  it was given at this year’s IAI Summit by Andrew Hinton. The topic is “Architectures for Conversation: What Communities of Practice Can Mean for Information Architecture (IA).” The end of the presentation is a little off-topic since it is specific to IA but the lead-up is a fascinating perspective on communities, organic vs. hierarchical structures, etc. To those who have been involved in CoPs for a while, there is probably nothing earth-shattering here, but he covers the territory with a sense of panache that catches the audience’s attention and gets the message across to non-KMers.

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