Wednesday, March 4 was already the fourth # CMNL meeting. This time the Caballero Factory and Winkwaves the stage for an interesting measuring up between Dutch community managers. Nice to see how we can now kick-off of a group of five people in four meetings have grown to a LinkedIn group with over 70 members and nearly 25 professionals last night, despite the municipal still looked for the Hague.

The host facilitates the snacks and the substantive program, so last night was the turn of Rene Jansen of Winkwaves their experiences with community management explained to do. The experiences of Winkwaves are based on the four years that they as an agency for social media and knowledge exist, which she practices from the establishment of online comunities customers combined with scientific research. That it leads to an interesting approach to the art community management was demonstrated by the lively discussions that arose yesterday.

The presentation was in the main dominated by two topics: how to design for online communities and what role the online community that? Both questions for community managers in a knowledge-intensive society and organization of course extremely relevant. The basic principle is that where 40% of the work we are doing with each consisting of knowledge-intensive work, we each facilitated to be in our work suitable partners to find, learn together, to make sense and work together and finally together to attract, retain. Social media is the belief, can play an important role. However, these assumptions have significant implications for how we design online communities to look and how the role of community managers fit into it. It forces us to think beyond features and actions and think about how the game functions and activities in the community facilitates played.

How to design for online communities?

The model for designing online communities (or knowledge-intensive environments) is based on the theory of Sociology and Wenger Communities of Practice around (something I still have a thesis and the required blog posts written about). Theory Wenger is about how we as people interact, collaborate and learn. Sociality, the natural geneigheid to come together, is a central issue. That sociality is the dualities between "Social Structures" (the influence of group behavior has on you as an individual) and "Situated Experience" (you choose the behavior you exhibit, but it does influence the group) and the "Theories of Practice" (what we do) "and" Theories of identity (who we are) the other. These four dimensions provide the theory of social groups operate and develop.

The position is that if you facilitate this process (whether through the use of technology), then you have these four dimensions of space they give to develop. What it takes to look at is caught in the four realms (domains) in the picture above.

• Enabling the realm of practice: facilitating what people always wanted to do
• The realm of mimi cking Reality: Connect with ideas and patterns that practitioners already have (terminology can be very important!)
• The realm of identity building: Let members can connect with the group, let them feel that they belong.
• The realm of self-actualizing: Allow members more out of themselves. Hold up a mirror to how they stand against the group and the group towards them.

There ensued an interesting discussion on the sustainability and usefulness of such a model in the daily work of community managers. First is really looking for the "silver bullet" which has a direct impact and what can I show them to my managers? Or there is the realization that every community is different, it is not determined by the features you offer, but rather the behavior that people exhibit spread and the fact that they feel comfortable and happy to get your community.

My hypothesis would be that as community manager should look for how laws applied in sociology (as an example of this model, but also a fantastic list of Richard Millington can serve as a basis ) to facilitate your online community. People just do not function according to members of a community. A platform in itself is nothing. They are members of a community because they have something in common with the people operating there. Thus, once again confirms that top-down communities by Corporate Communications departments are often very successful because there is no sense of ownership among members.

The argument yesterday was suggested that many communities living in the here and now I want not to go. I believe that good communities just a historical building and creating with each other. It's in small and big things: recognize each other during meetings, refer to old events within the community and determine policy for new members. Build communities that are not historical or not wish to maintain may be no success, perhaps even superficial. I think the MySpace and Facebooks of this world as an example to his (at least at first sight and the front). Twitter is different because in Twitter be able to create such relationships. Let's community managers working on the idea that our members do to facilitate shared a history that is valuable to them, to build.

What is the role of the online community manager in an online environment?

Thus, the question naturally arises as a community manager should do to such a view to facilitating communities. It presented a simple model Rene (with big implications) of the three core tasks of a community manager. In short: the work of a community manager is not limited to supporting the community members. What happens within a community is playing a game and the role of community managers, this game and the players understand, to design them and then support. This is a difficult and challenging (but rewarding) process, the fact that communities are often in fits and starts to develop, as the recognized stages of life of a community show.

Finally, the propositions were also on the role of community manager in more operational processes. Especially in the gray area, which clearly is a situation that is not in best interest of the community, but not so bad that immediate action is required, is often in doubt what to do. Kirsten said there's a good case in which best practice is to focus the dialogue with stakeholders, often in 95% of the cases the sting is taken out of the discussion. In other cases, more is needed. It was in passing a balloon a little embarrassed if something of a Trias Politica surrounding communities is needed. Clearly fodder for one of the meetings seems to me ...

Next meeting May 12

After the presentation of Rene went into the talks for days. The scientific approach to community management had clearly struck a chord. All in all, # CMNL4 a very successful session with discussions of interesting content and great organization (special thanks to Nophert!).

For now, the next meeting scheduled for May 12 The theme is likely to success! be. Location unknown. Until next CMNL # !