The Building Blocks of successful knowledge communities

Communities of Practices are the lifeline of knowledge management framework for any organization.These Communities are built out of network of practitioners from the organization who collaborate to Innovate, share problems, experiences, insights, best practices and learn from others.

Communities serve an essential purpose of developing member’s capabilities and knowledge dissemination to global peers across the organization.

Given below are some of the building blocks for driving successful communities:

• Outline Community purpose –Is it is going to be a forum for Community members to help each other with everyday work or is the purpose to create breakthrough ideas, new knowledge and best practices? The clarity of purpose will help attract and retain the right audience.
• Hire Community champions: Community champions are the drivers of the Community. They are the subject matter experts who:

1. Seeds and monitor discussion on the Community site
2. Initiates, support roll-out and facilitates Community activities
3. Ensure content relevancy

Therefore, it is vital to hire the Champions who are ready to dedicate couple of hours in a week to drive the Community initiatives as well as regularly share key updates from their projects to keep the Community relevant for the members.

• Keep the Community content dynamic and easily accessible – Keep the site engaging by proving regular Community updates, leadership messages and recognizing key achievers to foster better engagement.  What’s new and hot in the Community should lead audience to the latest content.
• Refresh content - The content library should be regularly refreshed to ensure content and tagging relevancy.
• Conduct Periodic assessment – This step entails evaluating, recording, and communicating the achieved results of the Community. This could be done via satisfaction survey to members to access the Community performance and gather feedback for improvement.

Relevant Communities foster collaboration leading to deeper engagement among practitioners and discussions around applying the New with their clients. So, it is essential to keep the Community active and focused for the achievement of the expected results.