Professional Face

Having clear objectives

At the start it is useful to have a clear goal and objectives. If building a community or network then this will give signals to people encouraging them to join, to find out more. As the community grows, it is important to be prepared to be flexible and agile (see later) enabling the community to set the agenda. How far from the original goals this change happens in a BCE context will depend upon the raison d'être of the community. If it was intended to create and develop a Community of Practice then the purpose is to 'To create, expand, and exchange knowledge, and to develop individual capabilities' as opposed to accomplishing a specific task.

The differences between a Community of Practice and a project Team are proposed in the table below taken from Cultivating Communities of Practice (Wenger et al, 2002)

The goals in the Northumbria University Trial were clearly identified and were part of the module objectives. As part of an undergraduate course, the learners required some guidance and the business partners needed to understand their commitment.

The University of the Arts Trial also involved students (post-graduates) but their interaction was being involved in the discussions on topics pertinent to the professional group (photojurnalists). The community decided on the topics with suggestions from the educationalists. The site itself was developed based upon ideas from Cultivating Communities of Practice (Wenger et al., 2002).

Leeds University brought together many different communities allowing technology transfer officers to organise external skill sets as it is impossible to employ more smart people - teams are small. They worked with Manchester University using social media to find experts and outreach work. So in this trial the overall objectives were very clearly defined but as an internal Community of Practice (internal enterprise and knowledge transfer which is cross discipline) with devolved structure the activities were more asynchronous and devolved.

Knowledge House had a clear aim of improving their bespoke system but used their champions group (stakeholder representatives) to help define the objectives so these were understood and owned by the sponsoring community.

Well-designed site with help/training/advice

Most of the trials had a site that acted as a core or first-port-of-call and it was found to be important to have the site set-up and partly populated at the beginning. In the case of the University of The Arts, a few well-known and respected members of the community were part of the first wave of invitations; there was then a second wave of invitations prior to opening the site to all photojournalists.

Familiar tool or lookalike interface or industry using

Adopting the same platform as a professional body or similar may save time and effort for the user and in providing guidance on the BCE collaborative online tool. Leeds University piggybacked on the GINNN network (provided by professional group AURIL) and they believed that this choice helped the community to grow.

The University of The Arts also chose this path:

'Essentially we looked out at industry to see what it was using to distribute and share work, and used those 'industry strength' platforms. This had the additional benefit of meaning that we didn't have to deal with any internal IT issues over licenses, approval etc, which meant that the whole project was agile and could adapt to any changes rapidly and effectively.'

Resource available

Whichever collaborative tool is chosen or whatever the context, people will be needed to manage the resource. This may be embedded within existing workloads but if new work is generated then new ways of working may be needed.

'This ability to ramp-up new business capacity has placed a strain on the slender project management resource at Leeds. This in turn has focused the team on the need to embed social media to manage this collaborative resource, and to handle the new opportunities. And it has led to some radical rethinking of the project management process.'

University of Leeds

Uniqueness, reason to be involved

If there is no obvious or immediate benefit, then people will not use the collaborative tool. The uniqueness, or raison d'être, needs to be marketed. Sometimes, the unique selling point can be a surprise:

'One area that we expected to form a larger part of the community was the discussion forums on the Ning site; we put significant effort initially into 'seeding' these with questions and debates, but they were relatively little used by the community. Our instinct is that this is because the rise of blogging and the existence of other, longer established forums for the broader photojournalism and photographic community that serves this function. We came to realise that what we were providing that was unique was the live real time interaction and the archives of this, so we focused our energies to this goal and withdrew from promoting the asynchronous discussions.'

University of the Arts

If using the collaborative online tools as an alternative to face to face meetings, it is important to ensure that the sessions are well-prepared with assistance available if needed and that the virtual meeting really does have benefits such as saving time and travel.

Maintaining Interest

Maintaining interest in using the collaborative tool will initially involve resource. For example maintaining a library of short videos as these have to be produced, edited and stored. However, as time progresses, the 'community' may take ownership so reducing the commitment by one or a few people. This happened at The University of The Arts and stakeholders began to take responsibility for individual webinars and individual events - some of them real-world spin-offs.

If using webinars, then having multiple presenters can add interest with discussion between them being very engaging.

The University of Leeds generated interest within the University by targeted existing research and subject discipline groups, continually bring new people on board. Providing up to date lists of funding opportunities and news make people feel they need to be involved.

Agility

All parties need to be able to be agile and respond to new ideas and requirements; this may require additional resource. Agility is also linked to uniqueness - making the most of unexpected outcomes.

For example, The University of the Arts produced 'flipbites'

'A spin-off of the initial project idea that was a direct result of a demonstration by the JISC team at the initial BCE project workshop was the use of a flip video camera to capture short interviews with industry figures. We call these 'flipbites', and they consist of 1-2 minute 'talking head' clips where the speaker talks about one issue or question. We have recorded these at conferences, exhibitions and other industry events, and they have proven to be very popular with the community, with over 7000 views so far of the 24 clips posted to date. This demonstrates that projects need to be agile enough to introduce new innovations quickly when they emerge as useful possibilities.'