The offices of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) have been decked out with wikis, blogs and instant messaging after the agency deployed a social-media platform for its 3200 staff. –ZDNet (link)

The organisation has announced that is adopting IBM social software to support the way thousands of employees connect and interact. … “With Lotus Connections, ABS can use business-grade social software, straight out of the box.” — Government News (link)

the department’s chief of technology infrastructure, Duncan Young, found that, while the implementation started off as normal in the ABS technology e-division, it had become one of the easiest rollouts so far, thanks to enthusiasm amongst staff.  …. “It’s probably the first one I’ve seen that’s been taken up in a viral type fashion.â€� –Computerworld (link)

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Overview:  Launching and getting up and running is only half the battle when it comes to CoPs.  CoP pundits are constantly advocating new social technologies, new processes, and new metrics. But for a CoP (and its members) to thrive requires embracing a few simple organizational change ideas, and making them concrete, authentic, and fun. The “Sustainable Communities Critical Success Factorsâ€� do just that. A sustainable Community of Practice (CoP) demonstrates measurable value to both the organization and CoP participants  contributing relevant knowledge, and nourishing lasting and productive relationships.  Any CoP, by definition, convenes to cross organizational boundaries, to build a shared body of knowledge, and to network.  But a sustainable CoP comes together with a shared sense of passion and applies that to practical outputs. While most COPs fade, sustainable CoPs endure:

• Members express a spirit of volunteerism that beyond their personal objectives and “WIIFMâ€�;
• CoP “working groupsâ€� generate relevant products that integrate diverse insights; and
• CoP outcomes show up in corporate metrics, and, ultimately CoP ideas influence corporate planning.  

The virtuous cycle above came to me over ten years of trial and error as a member or leader of about 50 CoPs. I found that getting the CoP started was just the tip of the iceberg.  To endure, a CoP must have both the fortitude to withstand criticism, and flexibility to evolve as the market changes.  That requires a regular tuning to the corporate goals (in green, “strategic alignmentâ€�), a great sense of process (“facilitationâ€�), and even a bit of shameless self promotion (“recognitionâ€�). Sustainable CoPs begin with a common sense of need.  Members believe that the community is essential to their individual effectiveness (e.g., market presence, knowledge currency, sounding board), and that wholeness of the community is essential to their own wholeness.  For example, a member’s departure represents a loss of insight or perspective. Effectively, members share a sense of “fate.â€�  Sustainable CoPs transform that sense of fate into a shared personal commitment.  That is, beyond charters and metrics. Reaching across boundaries, members gain a certain “faithâ€� that the CoP is a worthy haven, e.g., for courageous work and unprecedented outcomes. This sense of “faithâ€� is not always dependable, and it is certainly not “free.â€�  Where my CoPs have found this, they’ve been intentional about how they build, engage, or restore that CoP commitment.  Over time, I’ve come to believe in this simple equation:  

Sustainable Communities’ Ten CSFs

I’ve tried to boil down CoP practices that I’ve picked up along the way into “Critical Success Factors,â€� or CSFs.  I’ll share the highlights.  I’m not putting them in any particular order, except, perhaps how they became apparent to me as I failed at different ways of managing and participating (sometimes taking rejection too personally), and rethought my approaches.  Here are the Ten CSFs, in brief:

1. Regular Real-time Meeting: Meeting regularly in person or virtually creates connection, a sense of belongingness, and an experience of “showing up for each other.â€� For both participant and listener, the real-time conversation — with its cadence, inflection, and direct interaction– goes far beyond text-only dialogue to help transform interaction into co-creation.

2. Role/Charter-Clarity: Avoiding two common CoP hazards, ambiguity and scope-creep, requires role clarity for the community. The charter clarifies where you are going (and why a CoP is suitable for that journey).  Role definitions succinctly show the workings of the CoP operation to any member or onlooker. Role definitions are just as essential for community members at large, as they are for the Core Team, the working group leaders, and the Sponsors.

3. Leadership and Facilitation: To hang together, all communities need some form of governance.  An effective leader-group generally includes the Sponsor, the Core Team, and Working Group leaders.  The Core Team is like the power company.  Facilitating, networking and representing the community to the Sponsor, they open the current, light up new houses, and provide a sort of grid for finding members’ energy. The Working Group leaders are like electrical switches. They play a crucial role in directing community members’ energy toward agreed-upon CoP “products.â€�

4. Practitioner-Led: CoP’s are considered effective and “value-addedâ€� only when they are led by the practitioners. In other words, even while social media experts may step in to help jump-start the group’s formation, practitioners are the most credible leaders. (Just a note of caution: Make sure that a enthusiastic [read: dogmatic] subject matter expert is not also the facilitator, lest they dominate the thought and crowd out the learners or explorers.)

5. Establish Rapport Explicitly: To build CoP member engagement, leaders use facilitation moves and off-line check-ins with participants. For example, my Core Teams have “dialed for dollars,� each of us checking in with a handful of members at random between full-membership meetings. I’ve often come out of those calls with improvement ideas, working group volunteers, and new member candidates.

6. Ground Rules:  Just as the routine meeting is critical, so too are ground rules — the conduct and overt expression of shared values in the meetings.  For example, IBM’s Rawn Shah identified nine “guidelinesâ€� at the E2.0 meeting in Boston June 14th, including such unconventional “rulesâ€� as “Be the first to respond to your own mistakes,â€� and “Be who you are.â€�

7. New Member On-boarding:  Formal onboarding accelerates the time to make the “newbieâ€� feel a sense of belonging , and for them to contribute productively.  I’ve used simple new member virtual “packets,â€� containing things like CoP charter, workspace or microblog sign-on instructions, meeting schedules, leader profiles, working group information, and ground rules.

8. Measure and Continuously Improve: CoP measurement has two major goals: 1.) Keeping your Sponsors on-board; and 2.) Enabling members to periodically celebrate or make course-corrections.  Even while hard numbers for CoPs’ impacts on revenue and productivity are hard to come by, such formal business measures can be shown to correlate with member counts, meeting participation, people-finds, docs-shared, and focused deliverables of working groups.  Anecdotes about knowledge-reuse are also useful for representing the CoP’s impact.

9. Use Technology Effectively:  Before talking about technology, first some definitions: “CoPs are the human beings.  Tools enable their processes and connections.â€� CoPs are NOT the tool. (Nothing irks me more than when someone points to the computer monitor and says, “See the CoP?â€�)  With humans in mind, the tool(s) must be easy to integrate into life. More is not better. The CoP needs to size up the typical members’ capacity to engage with technology, and then prioritize among things like shared doc-stores, RSS feeds, Threaded Discussions, LiveMeetings, Microblogs, Social Bookmarks and Wikis.

10. Get Recognition/Give Recognition: Recognition is not only fun. It also makes sense. Community-pride and cohesion grow with recognition from the organization, and individuals’ CoP loyalty grows with authentic recognition by the CoP members.  Effective CoPs I led were routinely nominated for corporate awards, and we also took meeting time to recognize members’ valuable actions, such as leading working groups, contributing discussion threads, and welcoming new members. The ten CSFs can be a good way for CoPs to do a self-assessment, and consider course corrections.  More, using the CSFs to benchmarking across CoPs can lead to good learning and cross-pollenization.  Here’s a sample point-in-time benchmark we used at a technology company a few years ago.  (Note: “ARâ€� represents “Action Required,â€� or a recommended course correction.)

Where from Here?

Sustainable CoPs who practice the CSFs are those where members get value.  Specifically, members…

• Come together around a goal that they’re passionate about;
• Think across functional or divisional or organizational silos;
• Test ideas in safety, and grow a sense of trust through a shared track record of debates, explorations, and truth-tellings;
• Experience collaboration without hierarchy or judgment;
• Serve as a powerful, cross-organizational voting block for topics that don’t have natural support from silo-owners; and
• Tap into a network of supportive problem-solvers.

When members’ feel their CoP participation is worthwhile — when they share a “faithâ€� — the CoP can also grow into a business-critical corporate asset.  Productive relationships result in outcomes like smarter selling, faster delivery times, faster integration of new employees or new (acquired) businesses, and greater safety.  CoPs are not for the faint of heart.  I’m the first to admit that working the ten CSFs can be challenging. But the rewards are tremendous.  

About the Author:

Katrina (Kate) Pugh is president of AlignConsulting, which does business planning and knowledge-based transformation, using CoPs and other strategies.  She is the author of the forthcoming book, Sharing Hidden Know-How: How Manager Solve Thorny Problems with the Knowledge Jam (Jossey-Bass, 2011). Kate has 16 years of consulting and seven years of industry experience in the IT, healthcare, energy, and financial services sectors. Kate held leadership positions with PwC/IBM, Fidelity, JPMorgan, and Intel Corporation.  Kate has an MS/MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, has a BA in Economics from Williams College, and has certificates in facilitation, project management, mediation, and LEAN Six Sigma Blackbelt.  Kate has published articles or led workshops on sharing tacit knowledge in Harvard Business Review, NASA Ask Magazine, European American Business Journal, SI KM Leaders, Center for Business Intelligence, and KM Forum.

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Photo courtesy Alex Williams –  see more pics here

Here is a video of the opening session.  Marshall Kirkpatrick kicked things off with a great discussion on the impact of the real time web. I followed up with a short talk on real time enterprise (I’m at about 33 min in). Then afterward, the unconference topic facilitation began.  SInce they are hard to see in the video, I included my slides in at the bottom.

Watch live video from ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Web Summit on Justin.tv

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The “Measuring the Value of Social Software” white paper focuses on helping organizations answer the question:

How can we determine if our social software initiatives are successful and are providing the anticipated return on technology investment?

This white paper looks at how to measure the effectiveness and value of a social software initiative, what tools are available to capture key metrics, and what to take into consideration when establishing a measurement approach.

Contents

• Why measure?
• Defining objectives
• Types of measurement
• Measurement levels
• Measurement tools
• Sample reports
• Creating a measurement approach

Authors:

• Chris Cooper (Collaboration and Social Software Consultant – IBM Software Services for Lotus)
• Mike Martin (Senior Managing Consultant – IBM Software Services for Lotus)
• Terry Kiernan (Offerings Specialist – IBM Software Services for Lotus)

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Note: This new machine translation service works on all content in the Lotus product wikis. We continue to have our product documentation translated by our translation centers and published separately for reference.
Try it To see n.Fluent in action:
1.        Visit any of our Lotus product wikis, for example the Lotus Connections Wiki, and look for the n.Fluent translation tool in the left navigation:
2.        Select the language you’d like to use, and n.Fluent translates the current page.
3.        As you browse to other pages in the wiki, they are automatically translated into the chosen language.
4.        To contribute a modified translation, hover over the text that you’d like to modify. A window opens, giving you the chance to suggest a better translation:

5.        Type your suggestion and click Submit.
6.        Your translation displays in italics on the page. This suggestion is then contributed back to the n.Fluent server, where it becomes part of the stored translation and is used to improve the accuracy of other translated content.

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Today in Connections Communities, there’s this button “Mail Communityâ€� that let’s someone send a direct email to people in the community

and it has a few aspects to it, that you may or may not be aware of … and why they are there…

First, the link about using your favorite email client. This is merely the “mailtoâ€� type feature, that will pop up the user’s current default email client with the list of the community members (or just owners, if that radio is selected). Our motivation for supporting this feature is to let you use the email client you prefer, and allows you to easily incorporate all aspects of email (like rich text, attachments, etc) in a place you’re familiar with. However, there’s a drawback. Since “mailtoâ€� is a URL, it has some specfic limitations, primarily that in IE they impose a maximum limit of just over 2000 characters. So with this limitation, using the mailto for a community of 200 members for example, where each member’s email is on average 10 characters..well, we hit that limt…so, mailto is less than optimal.

Second, there’s a “To:â€� link, which, if clicked pops the entire membership into a text area. This design is intended to let someone easily perform an old fashioned copy/paste and and use that list of emails as desired (like pasting into their email client).

Ok, that being said, there is a different UI experience in connections for things like notifications…where we’ve adopted a UI that presents a list of people, by display name, with checkboxes alongside, as shown below;

Now with this design, someone can select all or select a subset…and can also use a filter to whittle down the list of names. This interface has a couple of advantages, first being that we show the list as human readable display names (and not the potentially crypitc email addresses)…and for those of you who worry about email security, as in, please don’t show my email to others, this approach provides a blind so that someone can email without knowing the recipients actual email address. Finally, one big advantage is that this is the standard connection interace for notifications by email.

So now the question is, should we drop the community mail design in favor of the more standard connections notification pattern? Also, as part of this question, I’d love to hear from you all about what, if any features from the community email form you make use of…like mailto link or expanding the To field, etc…

Finally, here’s a mock up of something we could do with the community mail form if we decide to adopt the standard notification pattern;

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The BlackBerry Client for IBM Lotus Connections offers enterprise social networking capabilities for people-based collaboration by extending Lotus Connections Profiles, Activities, Blogs, Communities, and Bookmarks to BlackBerry smartphone users, and helps them access the information and expertise needed to remain productive while on the go. The BlackBerry Client for IBM Lotus Quickr establishes a framework for document-based collaboration, extending Libraries, Folders, and Files to BlackBerry smartphone users and give on-the-move employees the ability to quickly share critical documents from the BlackBerry smartphone.

Learn more about the Connections client here and the Quickr client here.

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We decided to go with a chocolate brown faux leather, and we purchased queen sized quilt batting as the McKevitts suggested. In total, we spent $120 on 2.5 yards by 54″ of leatherette and we sprung for the extra thick batting. Five minutes before it closed, we scampered away and headed to Home Depot. We purchased an MDF board, which was 90″ x 48″ and had it cut to 82″ x 35″. We thought about going 40″ but realized we wouldn’t be able to fit that in the car. We’re happy with the 35″, as you’ll see later. Our total, including a 100 lb max french cleat, a staple gun, staples, 200 decorative furniture tacks (which we didn’t use), spray adhesive (which we didn’t use) and the board was $80.

Once we got everything home, we staple gunned one layer of the batting to the board and folded the other batting over it to form 3 layers. Then we stretched it around the sides to secure there with the gun. Next, we added the leatherette cover and stapled down tightly across the top and bottom. Next, I created corners I liked and stapled down the sides. Finally, Mike precisely measured where to place the cleat, screwed it in, and then we measured and attached it to the wall. Voila! We were done by 10:30, including a 20 minute call with Mike’s Mom, and Mike’s precision job with the end “table” hanging sconces we used (we don’t have enough room there for actual end tables).

Here is the result of our handiwork!

Here is a close-up of the board:

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