The Virtual Gardener
The place where I explore online community cultivation, propagation and harvesting techniques.
I've been working as head of consultancy at Sift for the last four years. The business supports all organisations looking to respond to a Web 2.0 world and truly engage with their audience - and has been doing so for the past 10 years.
This blog originally started out as a comment on a conference I attended about online communities. I'm now using it as a thought-bin for related stuff. Any gaps in posting doesn't mean I've stopped thinking ...
From networking to network
If you like charts this one’s for you. Patti Anklam did a sterling job helping us over the semantics of what is a network and a community. In short, I now recognise a community to be a subset of a network.
A network has four fundamental properties:
1. Purpose
2. Structure (the chart bit, which, depending on how it’s drawn gets us to think differently about how we relate to others)
3. Style (what does it feel like)
4. Value (what is the ecosystem)
The tools used to analyse a network are:
1. Organisational Network Analysis
2. Value Network Analysis
3. Sense making framework (Cynefin) - this is based on Dave Snowden’s work. I saw Dave explain this a couple of years ago. Seemed to make sense then, but the challenge is for him and Patti to leave a lasting understanding of the methodology without the help of case studies. This was a good illustration of knowledge being hard to pass on without stories.
