Comments on: ‘Communities’ and ‘Networks’: A Conceptual and Linguistic 2.0 Mess

By: Kyra Gaunt, Ph.D.

Kyra Gaunt, Ph.D. — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 11:47:13 +0000

Love this! This helped me see what was missing in my desire to create a self generated classroom space. Networking. Thx.

By: Giles (Webconomist)

Giles (Webconomist) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 13:16:13 +0000

Great write-up; added to the complexities of the technology is how workflow and communications amongst various elements in an organization are governed.

Odd that without good communications a company can’t operate; these social technologies enhance/improve workflow & communication but are disruptive to traditional hierarchical organizations.

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Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:12:34 +0000

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Robert Lavigne and Thierry de Baillon, Thierry de Baillon. Thierry de Baillon said: [blog post] ‘Communities’ and ‘Networks’: A Conceptual and Linguistic 2.0 Mess http://bit.ly/7Jhmv7 [...]

By: Thierry de Baillon

Thierry de Baillon — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:05:55 +0000

Francois, I totally agree with you, communities are made up of networks, whose density and width depends on the type of community we deal with. Internal communities are usually built around roles, practices, or even ideally around clients, in which they differ from external communities like communities around technologies or around brands, if these exist I mostly see this difference like the one between marriage and relationship, where people begin by learning to know each other before feeling they belong to each other. Emergent practices will then rise which will stitch people together and allow them to work in new, collaborative ways, maybe independently from pre-existing or new formed networks.

Not to say that there is no ‘inside’ networks there, it is notably among community management’s best practices to leverage them to help collaboration and adoption spread faster. But I think that freeing networks from a community ‘shell’, letting them evolve and operate across existing communities and processes, adds tremendous power to the connected enterprise.

By: Francois Gossieaux

Francois Gossieaux — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:34:06 +0000

Thierry – Great post, although I think about the mess a little differently.

Communities are made up of networks. Sometimes there can be multiple networks in communities, sometimes the networks have very tightly connected members at the core, and sometimes you can have networks that are very loosely connected. Think of the SAP community, with 1.5M users. If you were to look for networks in there you would find many. Some of them would be pretty tight, some might have ring networks in them, etc. If you look at customer support communities on the other, you may only find very weak networks in them. And in the case of customer review communities, there may be almost no networks.

Not sure if this distinction makes sense…

Francois