Community minus people = empty (Photo by marilynpratt)
It suggests than an “online community” is something you build like you build: a web site, or a portal. It suggests that the community is the site itself. (It’s a strange kind of synecdoche, in which the web platform where some community interaction takes place is taken to be the actual community itself).
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Found this interesting comment in a blog post by Tony Byrne from CMS Watch on the social software marketplace and the fact that Intel leverages multiple community software vendors:
What this should tell you? That large companies at the forefront of enterprise social computing — like Intel, Dell, and others — routinely turn to multiple suppliers for different types of internal and external communities. This may have something to do with inter-departmental politics and silos, but I think it actually makes sense: different vendors in this marketplace target different scenarios and will therefore be better suited to different business objectives
While I certainly agree that different vendors target different scenarios, I’m not sure I’d so easily accept the notion that multiple internal and external platforms make sense. He continues:
For example, Telligent sees some internal implementations, but is known mostly for its external-facing community implementations, while Jive’s Clearspace can and does get implemented externally, but is mostly known for its behind-the-firewall implementations. You the buyer should not assume that one size fits all.
Of course there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to community building. But does that necessarily mean the answer is to license multiple competing proprietary platforms for a single enterprise?
How well integrated are an internal implementation of Java-based Clearspace and an external implementation of .NET-based Telligent ever going to be, given that both are proprietary?
Of course, imposing one monolithic solution may not be possible either. I regularly deal with clients who have not just two core content management systems but as many as five or six: due to the “inter-departmental politics and silos” Tony mentioned above, or due to corporate acquisitions which bring their own legacy systems, or due to serial leadership changes and different IT strategies over time.
How do you enable the right balance of “fit-to-purpose” (which might identify different platforms for different social scenarios) against “fit-to-enterprise” (which would explore the impact of platform proliferation and silos)? What happens when the community you expected to be purely internal suddenly realizes that it would benefit from external input?
Leveraging mature open source platforms- and customizing them to fit the specific scenarios of the community being served- will better preserve long term business agility and ensure that those silos don’t become islands, but can share data and functionality with each other.
See also: CMIS, ECM Interoperability, and Services-Oriented Content Management
I was unfortunately unable to get to Drupalcon Szeged last month, so I’m now making my way through the videos and slide decks from sessions there.
One of the favorite keynotes of any Drupalcon of course is the State of Drupal address. Here’s video of Dries from Szeged:
Just came across yet another excellent post from Alex Russell of the Dojo project (and foundation): “The Price of Anonymity: Our Principles?”
Russell uses the occasion of some nasty comments in Digg on a Caryl Shaw article for PC gamer (and a series of presentations at OSCON a few weeks back) to reflect on the issue of sexism in free and open source software communities. Ultimately, the issue is really about what kinds of communities we want to be building. As he notes:
the frustrating conclusion [is] that this is the outcome the community allows. Surely this kind of objectionable behavior wouldn’t show up so frequently if we were closer to gender balance in the OSS world. But the larger tech world seems to be addressing the topic badly if at all and OSS is no exception.
Wednesday was day two of Web Content 2008, and I presented in the afternoon on the rise of user-contributed content and community, and the impact that’s had on content management.
I had thought about calling it “From Content Management to Community Management” or maybe “Content Management is Dead” but ended up instead with: “Upload, Tag, Share, Discuss: Content Management in the Age of Participation.”
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