Communities

Tuesday Jul 18, 2006

An innovation from Sun this year was the creation of Community Portals. Within the discussions of web 2.0, we've heard about "the read-write web", but Communities adds something more than just the ability to read and write portal pages. Following are a few of the enhancements which change our understanding of how individuals and teams interact with the web and each other - a union of the individual and the community.

1. Community Actions
   
• Normally a person accessing a web application or a portal page, does so as an individual or as an anonymous user, but within a community, while the actions can be audited for compliance per the individual, actions are executed with the community as an entity in and of itself.
  
• Example: a calendar portlet on a normal page shows an individual's calendar, but a community calendar portlet on a community page shows the "community's" calendar. If two people see the a calendar portlet on a normal page, they each see different data, their own calendar appoitments, but if they both see a calendar portlet on a community page, they will each see the same data, the community's calendar. If they see the same community calendar portlet on a different community page, they will each still each see this new community's calendar which is different than that presented in the other community.
  
• Another example is a business process. In a community, team members could individually contribute to the group's set of tasks. Each individual can see what tasks must be accomplished, and the team together accomplishes the tasks.
2. Facilitate Community Creation
   
• Community Portals provide a simple method to create a team - especially one distributed organizationally or geographically. The simplicity alone facilitates and encourages the formation of communities. And once created, it as a unit creates knowledge.
3. Community Embodiment
   
• As individuals create, join or are added to communities, they and their work embody the community itself. "I am part of ProjectX", "I need to finish these tasks for Project X", "My ProjectX is nearly complete", each statement discusses the community as an entity even though the reality of a community is that it consits of a group of individuals, a set of services, and a set of associated data -- the goals, objectives and deliverables become objects of the community. The services, content and data created for the community portal become the community itself. Additionally, given that community involvement can span large time periods, often spanning longer than individual participants, the community portal sustains the community over time. There are probably more metaphysical/sociological points, but in brief, the community lives within the community portal.
4. Community Cross Pollination
   
• Communities are usually mutually exclusive, but they may link to each other, reference one another, and include common members. Because one individual can be in multiple communities at a time, the individuals of one community can pull ideas from other communities.
  
• A community with 10 members, with each member belonging to 5 communities and if on average only 20% of these individual's communities overlap, then the community's team may be participating in over 40 communities whose knowledge and processes may benefit the community.
5. Community Socio-dynamic activities
   
• Communities have, create and can facilitate the behaviors of its members. These beneficial behaviors (more collaboration, more research for reuseable expertise, more productive emphasis, more coordination, more camaraderie) are often easier to create within an online community.
  
• Example: individuals may work harder, competing with each other on tasks or contributions. Individuals may be able to work better together "through" a community rather than in person, they may understand each other better, they may feel closer to other team members [one of the methods to improve a team's productivity is to increase physical proximity], communities provide a "virtual, physical proximity".
6. Open standards growth
   
• While current collaboration systems are proprietary or not expandable, community portals leverage standard portlets for services and thus allow easy expansion. Collaboration systems, evident from their basic requirements, need to expand, evolve, and grow over time.
  
• Today, enterprise collaboration systems must allow new services to be added overtime. Today they system allows web posting, file sharing, shared events while tomorrow they will need social networking, linking, project management, business processes, etc. Over time the number of communities will grow and the number of services will also need to be able to grow without migration or replacement. (A future blog post will discuss why migrations will one day be a thing of the past (why do I need to install a new OS instead of just adding functionality to it???). Existing communities may remain using exisiting services or may add new services over time.

In conclusion, community portals are far more siginificant than just facilitating the "read-write web", they change how we will work with the web and each other. The ability to expand the functionality of these Community Portals using Portlets available from the Open Source Portlet repositorywill be an enourmous benefit to people world-wide.

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Posted at 09:25PM Jul 18, 2006 by ripcurl in Sun
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