The Challenge of Distributed Communities

all communities are distributed to some degree.

When these four factors distance, size, organizational affiliation, and cultural differences are

compounded, they make building and sustaining communities significantly more difficult.

In one global community headquarters and field people have different points of view about what their community should be about. The most difficult in this matter is define the focus because each one has different ideas.

Trust and Personal Relationships

In local communities there are more opportunities for spontaneous networking and making new contacts than in a big one.

The new affiliations also make more difficult tell your confidence to this new members so when one community is gowing up too fast is normal talk about neutral topics than enter in an important professional ideas or personal staffs, its normal think they can use this information against you.

Also cultural differences often make trust and personal

relationships more difficult. Normally connect with others

from their own cultural background is more comfortable. When people with time know others with different cultural traditions or points of view about some terms, normally increase the

 sense of connection with people from different parts of their own country, but they diminished their sense of belonging to the whole. Is important work to put a solution in this type of problems and work better.

Craft Intimacy

In the way you increase the craft intimacy and trust between people in distributed divisions,

they continuous talking more and more, making the information more useful and easy to aplicate.

Communities of practice create the common talent pool globalization requires. People in different part of the world working in the same topic, in the same project, just because all of them have something to offer, making the work more productive and eficience.

In the past companies worked in groups with workers and a manager who earn more money and can organized the team, when this group is bigger maybe the manager is from a different

discipline who cannot truly understand the technical contribution of other workers. When you are working in a virtual team often you don’t see the others for a long time, maybe you don’t know his face because you have ever seen them, you only know the team member in the same location than you. In global companies team leather can be from another discipline, a different region or country or different bussines unit. Normally they change their locations leaving projects, communities are basic to this projects, they give it more stability. Communities of

practice can create a deep sense of organizational belonging independent

of location and day-to-day job responsibilities.

SEVEN PRINCIPLES FOR CULTIVATION COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE

We can find seven supports of a professional Community of practice, I will pass directly to resume those attending the principal characteristics of them.

It’s important to take an account the design. It will be improving in the way that members of it want, creating websites, forums… growing up in the most famous or interesting topics.

The second support is the view that others and the members have about the community. It’s important be objective, open minded with the others points of view but respect it and try to learn what others can teach you. Small communities normally are helped by the bigger, this is normal and good, because this type of knowledge is universal and good for everybody.

There are differents levels of implication in the community. Creatives and administrators, the high level and with more fuctions on it; more active members and secondary members: they are more or less 95 per cent of the members and a lot of them don’t write normally, only take information or write ideas or studies with different values.

The topics in a community can be prepared in private or public spaces. Normally when one of them is good finish in public spaces where everybody can show their opinion and make it more useful.

The ambient in a community is one of the most important support because when you feel secure and convince u can give your opinion and other members will take an account seriously is when members will work and express all they want making more productive the site for example.

The seventh support and also important is the steady pace, and this depends on when do you publish new topics in the community, for example one blog like this will have more visits when you publish something and announce it on favebook or twiter than 3 days later.