Strengthen Your Community with a Knowledge Sharing Network

Submitted by Brett on Fri, 06/10/2011 - 11:06am
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By Laura Norvig, Special Librarian, the Resource Center

Whether your nonprofit organization provides services or advocates for a cause, your stakeholders have common interests. Perhaps you already provide them with relevant content through a website, e-newsletter, e-mails, or social media channels. Maybe you’ve also taken the next step of strengthening your stakeholder community by engaging in back and forth dialog online – whether in existing social spaces like blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, or in a custom built online community.

Are you ready to take your community to the next level of maturity?

Consider how you can support more robust knowledge sharing. By providing your stakeholders with a dedicated place to share knowledge with one another, community building happens naturally. Such a place can also be a source of “user generated content”, relieving your internal staff from the burden of coming up with fresh content, and truly leveraging the ideas of your larger community.

What is a knowledge sharing network?

Knowledge is a lofty word. It implies not just “information”, but also understanding how things work. A robust knowledge sharing network might involve people sharing resources, best practices, worst practices, just-in-time information, quick tips, and deep thinking, all focused on a specific topic.

What are some examples of knowledge sharing networks?

Some are small, private, and contained, based on specific job roles. For example, the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) created a space for a Training Officers Community of Practice. They used Basecamp to bring together all of the Training Officers at each State Commission throughout the country.

Some are medium sized and open, but still centered around a discipline. The Library Society of the World is one I use frequently. Although it has its own blog, and most of the members are on Twitter and Facebook, all of the action takes place on Friendfeed. Every day, people ask, and get answers to, questions about best practices, professional development, just-in-time technical info, whimsical resources, legal issues, and many other questions related to librarianship.

Some are huge. Wikipedia. ‘Nuff said.

Some are successful, but messy. The nonprofit technology community is a robust knowledge sharing network widely dispersed across many blogs, tweets, discussion boards, Facebook walls, etc. That can make it difficult to navigate. Marnie Webb introduced the nptech tag to help aggregate nonprofit technology content. Nptech resources can be found on delicious, flickr, slideshare, and Twitter. Peter Campbell leveraged RSS to pull the tagged items into nptech.info.

The tag points to individual resources, but is that knowledge? Deeper conversations about practice take place in blog comments, webinars, online chats and on Facebook. They also happen face to face at the NTC and other conferences. Knowledge sharing happens everywhere, but there is no cohesive strategy for archiving that knowledge.

That’s where curation comes in to lend a helping hand.

What is another characteristic of a good knowledge sharing network?

Automated systems can aggregate content coming from particular blogs, people, companies, keywords, or some combination of these. But these systems require the reader to filter out fluff, dreck, and irrelevant content. Curators can bring value by examining the incoming flow, cherry-picking the best, and then sharing that with others.

What are some of the benefits of knowledge sharing networks?

One of the biggest benefits a knowledge sharing network can impart to nonprofits is another avenue to fostering community and “stickiness”. If you can build an area of your website where people come to learn, teach, and maybe have some fun, they will likely return. Or, if you are clearly visible and helping to pull together threads of knowledge building across many platforms, your organization’s name is getting valuable exposure.

How would I start a knowledge sharing network for my community?

Same answer as for all of your nonprofit technology questions: be strategic.

First, be sure your community needs or wants one. Maybe they already do this somewhere else and you just need to connect more to the place or places where they do it. Ask them:

  • What type of information do you need to share? Experiences? Resources?
  • What tools do you already use, if any? What tools are you comfortable with?

Consider the answers, as well as your budget and human resources, and then determine what is required to support the network. Should you support their use of existing tools, or create a new space? What roles are needed? (See Amy Sample Ward's materials on Community Driven Social Impact for more details on strategically planning online communities.)

What are some possible tools?

A wiki is a great low-cost solution if your community is comfortable with it technically. It may still require somebody’s time to encourage participation and perhaps do a little re-formatting and re-organizing.

Discussion boards can be added to your website, leveraged in a Ning site, or you can use a google group or similar solution.

IdeaEncore is a nice solution for organizations that have limited web resources and want to share not just their own resources, but those of other compatible organizations. It doesn’t allow commenting on documents, but it’s a great place to create a libary of resources without hosting them yourselves. VolunteerMatch has taken advantage of this tool.

A more complex knowledge sharing platform might include:

  • the ability for users to upload documents, links, or just pose a question
  • commenting on any item
  • rating items
  • profiles so people can find out more about who is sharing this knowledge, and see quickly what other things they have shared.
  • tagging capabilities to keep things organized

A Drupal or Wordpress site could include these features by adding modules/plug-ins/widgets. Out-of-the-box solutions will not have all these features, but may have enough to meet your needs. Consider Ning, Basecamp, and Zoho. But remember, if you create a standalone tool you’re going to have to drive people to it.

What are some other considerations/barriers?

Hard to use

Some tools are going to be daunting to some members of your community no matter what you choose. Consider having a coaching system - perhaps some quick videos or screencasts that show how to participate, or perhaps a live webinar where people are asked to participate in a “sandbox” space and ask questions about the tool(s).

Security issues

If you open up comments to all users, you are going to get spammers. If users have to create an account, that in itself is a barrier, but it will allow you to delete accounts that spam.

If you open up filesharing, you could expose your members to viruses, unhelpful or inappropriate content, or spam. On our “samples from the field” section of our website, we have opted for a low-tech solution to shield against viruses and inappropriate content. We open every file submitted before publishing it to the website. Since my desktop computer at work is set up to scan all downloaded files, every file is checked. This also allows me to adjust the abstract and add tags if needed. This is a fairly human-resource intensive solution, so it would not scale well on a large operation. Sometimes human moderation is the only solution to delivering quality content.

Anyway, you already asked yourself what roles were needed when you did your strategic evaluation, right? Good. Now go forth and facilitate knowledge sharing!

Further reading:

Laura Norvig is the Special Librarian for the Resource Center at nationalservice.gov/resources She works on the taxonomy, information architecture, search quality, and usability of the website, curates content, and has been instrumental in developing a social media presence for the Resource Center. She tweets at @lnorvig and @serviceresource.