One size fits all Community of Practice?
Q: Why should there be at least 50 people in a CoP?
A: In a typical community, 10% or fewer of the members will tend to post, ask questions, present, etc. If a CoP has only 10 members, that means that only one person will be doing most of the activity. In a CoP of 50, you can expect around 5 people to be very active, and that is probably the minimum number for success. As the community grows in size, it becomes more likely that experts belong, that questions will be answered, and that a variety of topics will be discussed.
NOTES
Yes agree with this, but it’s not a hard and fast principal…but I suppose Stan qualified that by stating “in a TYPICAL community”
I know of informal email groups where there are about 5 people who always email each other with information and ask each other questions about a particular topic.
Naturally, if one of the people over time fails to share and answer soon they get dropped off the to: field as it’s assumed they are not into it (the topic), or at least into being part of the crew…so then it becomes a group of 4.
Since they decided to create an online CoP as a better way to share, we now have 50 members, with the same 5 people being the main sharers, and another 5 new people doing some minor sharing…leaving 40 people as your more lurker type behaviours.
So in this example whether there was 50 or 5 we still had a similar percentage of sharing going on.
The question, besides a better way to communicate is, are these people getting better personal value since opening up their informal group…no doubt the organisation at large gets value. Yes, their information is retained and it’s less messy; but are they getting added expertise value and learning by opening up.
And at the same time has opening up reduced the vibe they once had (the in-jokes, language, flow, the fact they didn’t have to give back-history when they said certain things, the fact that new comers ask already covered questions rather than searching, the fact that the community is not as cutting edge as it used to be as not everyone is up to speed on the topic, how do they feel about giving more than receiving…probably a good thing for their personal brand)
I’ve explained in more detail in this post inspired by Dave Snowden, You can’t control sharing, here’s why…
