(highlight:: A community of practice is a group of people who share a
passion for something that they know
how to do, and who interact regularly
in order to learn how to do it better– Etienne Wenger)
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(highlight:: A Community Manager facilitates the activities of a community and the interactions between community members.
Community management may be considered as “in-reach” rather than “outreach” or public engagement.– CSCCE)
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(highlight:: There are several metrics that can be calculated to understand the structure of a network, for example:The degree of a node is how many connections it has. The higher the degree, the more connected the node. For example, a community member who interacts with many different community members.Betweenness measures the number of times a node lies on the shortest path between other nodes. This indicates which nodes are ‘bridges’ between nodes in a network. For example community members who often interact with different groups of members.Closeness scores each node based on how close it is to all other nodes in the network. The distance is the lengths of pairwise shortest paths from a node to another node.
For example, this can be useful for finding community members who are best placed to influence the entire network most quickly.Clusters or communities are groups of nodes with a high number of connections among that. For example, community members who often work together. A clique is when all members are interconnected and a silo is when members have no connections with other clusters on the network.)
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Social Network Analysis is a powerful tool for understanding interactions and collaborations in a community and there are powerful R packages to help with the analysis. So, what if you wanted to do the same for your community? Here are our tips.Think about what the nodes in your community are (people, countries, organizations, …?)Think about the type(s) of connection you have in your community.Start with your paths for contributions.Identify which contributions can be done in teams.Consider that you might already have information about these connections.Take into account open/closed data and any privacy considerations.Automate what you can in the data collection.Formalize the workflow (code ;-)) so you can repeat & reproduce.Remember that it is hard to capture all type of interactions.You can take snapshot of the network model …… so you can compare it at different times.… so you can use it for measure the impact of interventions and programs.Share what you find with your community… and other community managers!
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