Sun, Apr 29, 2007

Andrew Hinton's Communities of Practice

by Austin Govella

Communities of interest, shared culture, is a more powerful framework for participation than communities coalesced around a practice. The former shares world-view while the latter only shares world-do.

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Last week, I saw Andrew Hinton give his presentation on communities of practice and why we should enable architectures of participation.

At the end, he kind of draws aside this curtain and lets you see something totally different, something he could’ve been building up to the entire time, but wasn’t necessarily. But there it is, behind the curtain.

Left me smiling.

In my view, good communications — whether they’re presentations, documentation, conversations, articles, whatever — should always leave you with jumping off points.

In this light, Andrew’s talk is fantastic. Just enough of a frame to ground the talk in your head; just enough ‘why’ so you understand how he got there. The end result leaves with enough information to question his conclusions, build on them, or supplement them. And of course, you can walk away immediately and start implementing his thoughts in your next project.

He’s close enough to both New York and DC that people should find a way to have him visit.

Communities of practice

One thing I noticed sometime later is that leaders should design all businesses to engender participation. Whether non-profit of for-profit, a business is fundamentally a community of practice.

In fact, I think you could make a very good case showing how successful businesses take advantage of architectures of participation. Even in today’s “innovation-space” successful innovation requires ways to propagate its ideas throughout the rest of the organization. (It seems MIG’s trailmarker relies on cross-silo interaction to spread innovations.)

In the real world, this seems obvious. At one GI-NORMOUS telecommunications company, management convened a series of “customer experience” summits that gathered people from across different silos and regions. The purpose was to let different regional units share with one another how they solved different problems in their area. Within a matter of months people had taken ideas from these summits and implemented them, measuring strong results in their own areas. By enabling cross-silo and cross-division communication, the company enabled high tides in one area to spill across corporate divisions and raise everyone’s boats. (I get bonus points for the semi-extended metaphor.)

Communities of interest

Andrew says communities of interest (i.e. you and I dig on Paris Hilton) are different than communities of practice (you and I practice design). This is technically true, but it munges the difference in a way that I think hides wat’s important.

A community of interest coalesces around shared culture. If you and I both dig on Paris Hilton, we do so because we both love pop or celebrity or fashion or something. There’s overlap between these communities. I would also be somewhat engaged by communities interested in fashion, pop, and celebrity.

My ability to participate in these conversations about pop, fashion, and celebrity is dependent on our shared culture. A shared language develops, and if my shared language for fashion is different than your own, then our shared mental models about fashion would allow us to translate and communicate with one another.

Communities of practice are engulfed by communities of interest.

Communities of interest, shared culture, is a more powerful framework for participation than communities coalesced around a practice. The former shares world-view while the latter only shares world-do.

For the purposes of architecting participation, communities of interest should have higher value. Of course, I’m kind of rambling, but I think that’s the gist of it.

By way of example, here’s how a pseudo-preppy weird kid on the debate team found a gateway into underground culture via the song “Stigmata” by the band Ministry with live clips of Gwar that was featured in a hyper-violent, hyper-erotic sci-fi movie called Hardware that had an appearance by a guy who sang for a band called Fields of the Nephilim.

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