Communities of Purpose: The Third Type of Community
Communities of Purpose: The Third Type of Community
I’ve been thinking about different types of communities recently. Two forms of community that are often discussed are “communities of interest” where the members share a common set of interests (e.g. a community of people interested in Japanese culture), and “communities of practice” where the members share a common set of skills (e.g. a community of marketing professionals). To these I would add a third type called a “community of purpose,” where the focus is on a shared goal (e.g. a political activist community or a community collaborating on a common project). Most existing community tools today are either focused on building communities of interest or communities of practice. But I am more interested in creating tools that help people create more productive communities of purpose. To do this we need to merge the functionality of groupware and knowledge management with emerging community tools for social networking, blogging, and wikis.
April 10th, 2005 at 8:50 pm
You might want to have a look here: http://bornholz.typepad.com/blog/2004/12/thank_you_37sig.html
it´s a goal-orientated community.
April 12th, 2005 at 6:30 am
Hey, Nova’s stolen my idea!
I’ve been preaching about “Communities of Purpose” and exactly this theme since as far back as 2002:
http://www.antseyeview.com/
Glad somebody is finally picking up on it
April 17th, 2005 at 4:09 pm
hi Mark -
I would have posted on Nova’s site, but comments appear to be closed. I’m relatively new to the blogosphere, but I’ve been around eLearning, CMS, knowledge management, and groupware technologies for more than 10 years. In all of that time, I *have* heard and seen a significant corpus of work published around Communities of Practice — vetted by eLearning and KM professionals — and a concept pioneered by Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave in numerous publications and *real* software packages since _1991_.
I think it’s a shame that Messrs Spivack and Lefkowitz are simply slapping a few quick blog posts and tags on someone else’s hard work, calling it a “Community of Purpose,” and now acting like children to claim it a new ‘meme’ that they discovered. You can’t discover something that many, many people are already aware of, and using today. And just because a term wasn’t coined within the last 30 days (literally, if you look at the posting dates), it doesn’t mean that it’s fair game to be co-opted.
If you google “Community of Practice,” you will see (if define:ing) that these concepts are basically the same thing. And, if you google the Web for the two different terms, there is no clear difference in meaning. Yet, when I search Mr Lefkowitz’ site, there is no mention of the term “Community of Purpose” dating back to the 2002 inception of his blog.
Personally, I think that the proof of who gets to claim a real contribution to ‘CoPs’ will be evident when we see a live service, and not just blog entries, putting these valuable methodologies to real work.
Thanks