What Is New and Innovative in

Collaboration Tools
that Your Organization Can Use for
Strategic Advantages?

Introduction to Technology Platforms

for Communities of Practice

Version of March 24, 2004

by George Pór

Collaboration: The New Engine of Value Creation

The availability of high-performance collaboration tools—and the extra
value they help create—gave rise to a new and decisive domain of
competition: your organization's capacity for high-trust collaboration.

If you want to kick your company's collaboration competence up a few

notches, internally and externally, then it needs to learn how to benefit
from today's advanced collaboration tools and practices.

For years, some of the largest businesses and NGO's of the world, as well
as public service agencies in many countries, have been using new and
more collaborative ways of organizing work and developing new
capabilities. Those emerging approaches include open source communities,
knowledge networks, and communities of practice, just to mention a few.

To deliver their promise of significant business results, their practices

must be supported by technologies that enable truly triple-E collaboration:
effective, efficient, and enjoyable. When knowledge sharing depends on
good will, then effectiveness and efficiency—the classic conditions of high
performance—cannot be met without that sharing also becoming enjoyable
and fun.

What are those technologies? This paper gives a compact introduction to

the enabling software of triple-E collaboration in communities of practice.

© 2004, George Pór 1

Software for Communities of Practice
Communities of practice, or "communities" for short, are self-governing
groups of people who share a passion for the common domain of what they
do and strive to become better at it. They create value for their members
and the organization hosting them through:

• Developing and spreading new knowledge and capabilities

• Fostering innovation
• Building and testing trust in working relationships 1

It is not surprising that communities of practice are central to successful

knowledge management initiatives.... They are channels for knowledge to
cross boundaries created by workflow, functions, geography, and time.2

Examples of communities of practice are found in many organizations and

have been called by different names at various times, names such as
"learning communities" at Hewlett-Packard Company, "family groups" at
Xerox Corporation, "thematic groups" at the World Bank, "peer groups" at
British Petroleum, and "knowledge networks" at IBM Global Services, but
they remain similar in general intent. Organizations like those support and
report on the formation and ongoing maintenance of communities,
recognizing the influence they have in helping the organizations to be
productive and innovative.3

Colleagues in the same profession who meet twice a month during a lunch
break or who share questions and ideas in a monthly conference call are
some of the simple ways in which those communities manifest. However,
the number of those who can participate in their productive conversations
is limited by the constraints of schedule, travel expenses, the scarcity of
airtime during conference calls of large groups, etc. Community software
helps to overcome these limitations.

They key modules of community platforms are sets of tools for:

• Knowledge development and sharing

• Relationship and trust building

1
Source: "Liberating the Innovation Value of Communities of Practice" in the forthcoming textbook
on "Knowledge Economics: Emerging Principles, Practices and Policies."
http://www.entovation.com/coming-soon.htm

2
Building and Sustaining Communities of Practice - a study by American Productivity and Quality
Center, http://www.apqc.org/
3
Evolving communities of practice: IBM Global Services experience, by P. Gongla, C.R. Rizzuto, in IBM Systems Journal 2001,
http://www.findarticles.com/m0ISJ/4_40/issue.jhtml

© 2004, George Pór 2

• Community facilitation and management

• System administration and customization, typically through a web

interface

Tools for knowledge development and sharing

Personal notebook
The personal notebook is a private, online scratchpad in which participants
can copy quotes, develop ideas, and gather relevant chunks of content
from documents and forums.

Personal publishing
Weblogs of members are chronologically organized notes from their
learning itinerary made available to colleagues for accelerating the cross-
fertilization of ideas through content syndication and news-feed
subscriptions.

Team and community blogging

These variations of collaborative blogging are designed to make team or
community-wide collaboration easier, more engaging, and inspiring.

Co-authoring and collaborative content management

The popular wiki software allows jointly creating and updating web-based
documents by all community members.

Discussion forums
Message boards and forums are the classic conversation engines and are
particularly well suited for issues management and collaboration on
specific topics or projects.
Forums can also provide a customizable mix of public, private, and
semiprivate conversation spaces with clearly defined boundaries between
them.

Document management
A good document management system integrated with the community
platform gives members the capability to post, organize, and version-

© 2004, George Pór 3

control completed files of all sorts, as well as assign action workflows to
each.

Hypertrails
Creating trails of hyperlinks that connect related pieces of content, news,
documents, and conversations is a key act of meaning making and
knowledge building. Community platforms should make it very easy for
each member to do that.

Taxonomy and metadata

Word and other documents, wiki pages, and forum topics should be
supported by a shared classification scheme (taxonomy) of terms used by
the community and their agreed meanings. Metadata, or data about data,
helps members managing the complexity of the various types of knowledge
objects in advanced community platforms.
Taxonomy and metadata are essential both to the creation and usage of
shared knowledge bases and to deliver personalized content to members.

Integration with the users’ home environments

When closely integrated with MS Office, the standard business software
suite provides members with personal productivity gains.
So does Web-drive, a software feature that lets members conveniently
move file and folders between their home environment and the
collaboration spaces.

Help systems
Context-sensitive and indexed help pages searchable by keywords are
required components of complex, feature-rich collaboration systems.

Search and navigation

A good search engine supports full-text searches of all content, including
blogs, forums, documents, and wiki pages.
Clickable site maps are visual navigation tools essential for visual
thinkers. Many managers and executives feel more at home with visual
displays rather than text-based navigation.

Tools for coordination and relationship and trust building

© 2004, George Pór 4

Member profiles and directories
The personal profiles and member directories support networking among
members, allowing them to find people with similar interest, affiliation, or
geographic area.

Calendaring
By using the calendar feature, members can review, add and edit events,
milestones, and appointments.

Presence indicators
The “who is online” presence indicators make visible which community
members are on line.

Real-time messaging and chat

The real-time connections between members via phone calls, instant
messaging, text and video chats with their rapid feedback loops are
excellent channels for relationship and trust-building and for sorting out
thorny issues that would be more cumbersome to do by e-mail or
asynchronous conferencing.

Project work areas

These are workspaces designed to help teams of the community organizing
around projects of shared interest and coordinating their collaboration in
and among those projects.

Tools for eliciting common views and intent

The following features of the platform allow the community to know better
its shared views and intent.
Voting, in its simplest form, is selecting from two or more options.
Polling is an activity that contains a question or list of questions to which
other members answer. After they enter a response, they will have the
opportunity to read the cumulative results.
Surveys are another tool for eliciting members’ opinions on issues of
portent to the community by having them enter their responses to a set of
questions. The survey-building tools should allow users to create surveys
and have the system tally the results.
Rating can be added—in well-designed community platforms—to almost
any content object. It is a primary tool for building reputations by
authoring content elements that score high in the collaborative rating.

© 2004, George Pór 5

Notifications
Interest-based notifications
Given the members’ interests reflected in their notification settings, the
system should send automatic notices when a new event, object, topic, or
reply appears that matches them.
Author notifications
Authors of content in the cybraries, forums, blogs, and wikis can ask that
they be notified when someone has opened their object or added a
response or comment to theirs.
System notifications
The system can send summaries of new activities in various areas on a
daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Automated invitations
Members should be able to send a templated invitation to colleagues to
join any online activity initiated by them.

Tools for community facilitation and management

User management
This happens through a web-based interface for creating user accounts and
allocating access rights in accordance with community-established rules.

Conversation management
Facilitators create and customize forums and topics by setting the
software switches so that the “interior design” of the conversation space
matches the community’s needs. The software also should support the
easy copying, moving, and hyper-linking of forums, topics, and replies
within and across connected communities.

Statistical tools
These tools allow facilitators to analyze the presence and usage patterns
to better understand and support the needs and aspirations of community
members.

Archiving tools

© 2004, George Pór 6

With these tools, community facilitators can remove completed topics and
projects from the active platform and save them for future reference in the
archives section, thus enabling more focused discussions on active topics
and projects.

How to choose a platform

There is no one community platform that has all of these features.

However, the more advanced a platform, the more it provides community
members and facilitators with more of the features outlined here. The
importance of what is missing from any community environment has to be
weighted against the current and near-term needs of your communities.
The single most important characteristics of community software is the
robustness of its architecture, capable of evolving with the changing needs
of the community while maintaining its integrity so that users won’t
become overwhelmed and confused by a patchwork of poorly organized
tools.
The platform we found that embodies most of these features, including the
evolutionary requirement, is enable2, which is published by Font Solutions.
We have been using their system for close to a year and are pleased with
both its performance and potential.
Other platforms for communities of practice worth giving attention to
include Simplify!, WebCrossing, and TikiWiki.
No matter which platform you choose, none of them will help your
communities become your organization’s strategic advantage, without the
work of the Community Architect, someone who understands the dynamics
of community formation, knowledge development, the software tools for
supporting both, and who brings them together into the potent
combinations. The Community Architect’s work will be the subject of our
next paper.

© 2004, George Pór 7