Knowledge Community - Partner Circles

A knowledge community is one of the central infrastructures for knowledge management. It addresses the need for managing relationships between knowledge holders, both as a substitute for managing individual knowledge items and as a complement to this approach.

The success of a community depends on numerous factors, the most important of which are the partners. This review focuses on the partner circles that together comprise the community:

The initial core of every community consists of the Community Leader and the Community Sponsor. The Community Sponsor is a senior manager in the organization who has set a goal to promote the community. They are responsible for resource allocation (financial resources, but no less importantly, time resources). They sign appointment letters for various role holders. They occasionally enter the virtual community, add a question or comment, and leave their mark. They are aware of face-to-face meetings and sometimes join, even if briefly. In work meetings, they suggest saving outputs in the virtual community and even ask, when executing new projects, whether we have learned from information already existing in the community from previous activities. Their overall involvement is not high, but they have great influence.

The Community Leader is the individual ultimately responsible for managing the community. They activate the many partners (as described below); they are responsible for initiating meetings, refreshing the content topics discussed by the community, managing users, and performing central operations that are not distributed (such as managing the FAQ, bulletin board, etc.). In short, the executor and facilitator.

The next circle of partners consists of content experts. Content experts complement the Community Leader's activities: each in their field is responsible for providing answers to questions, initiating forum discussions, adding information to databases, and contributing to the community's shared areas. Content experts are the center of gravity of the community, making it a high-level professional community.

The next circle is the central circle for which the community is intended. These are employees who require knowledge to perform their routine work, and, no less importantly, also generate most of the new knowledge. The content topics the community deals with are defined by the activities and areas of interest of these employees. These employees are invited to meetings, and intensive implementation activities are also conducted with them. These employees are expected to regularly enter the virtual community, utilize its existing content, engage in discussions through it, and initiate the addition of new content as needed. Trivial, but critical.

The last circle of partners is the broad virtual circle. Beyond the natural core group sharing in the community, there are additional groups of employees who may be interested in the community, such as managers in the organization who are no longer routinely involved in the content, but at a macro level. Employees in other roles who have a partial overlap and interface with the community's content. These employees are added to the virtual community but are not an integral part of the "group" and are usually not invited to face-to-face meetings. It should be noted that such a circle does not always exist, and it should not be created unnaturally.

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Want to learn more about KM strategy?

Here are some articles you might find interesting:

• The Desire to Share - The Fear to Participate

• Challenges in Building a Professional Virtual Community

• Integrated Knowledge Management in the Natural Work Environment