When does niche finding become group-think?

Thanks to blogging you can now find those very few other people around the globe who share your interest, and chat/think/share with them on a daily basis. In the mean time as an effect, your dealings and encounters with less likeminded people are reduced. Now what does this mean? Is our communication getting richer or poorer? Deeper, but narrower? Now what are the risks of groupthink occurring? Is it really so cross-cultural as it seems? Recently I read up on intercultural communication and was interested to see a research where it was found that class barriers are often more important than cultural barriers: a higher class Londoner has more in common with a higher class Indian than with a lower class Londoner. Bloggers all over the world have more in common with other bloggers than with their neighbours. 

When living in Egypt we would take camping trips into the desert. For safety reasons it was best to go with at least three cars. So every weekend we were camping out in a deserted desert with people with whom we did not necessarily have a lot in common except for having the urge (and the 4WD) to get out of Cairo. We got to know people who we would otherwise have ignored, and it turned out to be very worthwhile.

Will web 2.0 thus open our horizons or close them?

Including-excluding

So a lot of it all centers around community making. For a community to form, attracting and retaining members is key. So careful logging of why we become member of a certain community, when we feel that we ´belong´, when it is that a feeling of community starts, can give us some clues about community making. Am I part of my local community?

Yes, for I live and work here, barter with the neighbours, and frequent the local cafes. No, defenitely not completely for it is a rural portugese village with about 200 inhabitants, the average age must be 65 and I think we have the only internet connection in the village.

The neighbour and my son at work in the orchard demonstrate our contrasts.

From being abroad I have learned that to feel connected, speaking the same language is key. (That is why I try so hard to learn the jargon.)

So community making is about having things in common, recognition, trust. Community making requires networking skills (as Bevery quotes Anecdote in her post "a social networking mindset&quot but community is not only about including, also about setting yourself apart from ´the rest´; excluding.

During my early student years, I was an active member of a student association. It felt like home to us: safe, smug, “us” as different from “them”. It went as far as labeling any outsider; we´ld name them ´knorren´. Within the community great heights were achieved in terms of sharing, learning, fun. It was often difficult to explain this to outsiders: “They” don´t understand these things, we would tell each other. I also remember from being a student, meeting almost exclusively other students, effective communication with others (non-students), even parents, became harder.

Jargon or mindset

In an email to someone I said “this is the competition”, which revealed a consultant mindset instead of a knowledge management worker mindset. As a KM worker I would have said: “interesting opportunity to share”
It shows my ambivalence: do I want to be a researcher or a consultant? The answer is: both. I really like the reflective and analysing part of it all, but am convinced the learning on this theme, should be indicated, paced and fed, experienced from practice. So I want to be a practioner.

My real interest remains development. How can CoPs or web 2.0 contribute to solving complex problems, like watershed management or water distribution? To local development? To innovation? To partnering, brokering of contacts between public, private and third sector? To networking beyond communities?

Community making

The hard part of trying to initiate a community of practice seems to be creating a sense of community. Thinking about it, the whole of modern communication seems to be about community making. Communication used to be modeled: sender » medium » receivers. The hard part was the medium- you needed to convince editors to get your articles published, but once you’d passed that hurdle the readers would come more or less automatically with the medium. Now everybody can publish anything, but receivers are no longer to be taken for granted. So modern marketing, teaching, blogging, pod- and vodcasting: if you manage to form a community that is receiving, but also participating, you can roll. It´s community making that defines whether communication takes place.

So there are some exiting features about the new communication:
Role switching
Collaborative work
Niche communities
No longer same time same place

This has had great impact on CoPs, also. What I gathered from the discussion about minimal number of participants on the email group of com-prac: answers ranged from 2 to 30.000, examples provided. The original examples by Wenger about nurses on a ward have been complemented with modern examples of email groups with thousands of members…

But although most of our communication is with people we have things in common with, what is really interesting is establishing communication with ´others´, outside your own community. So if modern communication is about community making, how to reach people beyond your own community?

Jargon note: if you take interactivity seriously you should say not website but webspace