"Sandeep Krishnamurthy" <sandeep@u.washington.edu> shares a question from a classroom:
"What is the difference between a (for-profit) company and a community?"
And there have been several interesting replies. But it seems to me most of them assume that it's an answerable question: I think it depends on your position, point of view, and purpose. In short, on your situation. I've observed little communities in red-in-tooth-and-claw FOR-profits where the main purpose of the community was cultivating a little warmth and humanity (and resistance to the dominant culture). That's what I was looking for at the time and it made my life easier (actually led to a career change, where now I focus on communities of practice). The particular community I have in mind may have been invisible from the outside. From the inside it was fairly clear who was a member and who was not. And standing in the community depended on being an employee of the company. Similarly, I think a for-profit company looks different and IS different according to your point of view. Stockholders and executives saw a different company than the members of that community saw. Beyond that, when organizing a community of practice for the purpose of cultivating some competence (e.g., consulting skills or drilling oil wells) one is tempted to see community or its possibility before it's really "there." And that's a very useful mis-perception. Of course as I began to read about communities of practice I began to see them in all the company's nooks and cranies, although I think that for the most part they were ignored as a resource. It's a separate issue how communities manifest over the Internet, but I think the issue of the speaker or observer's situation is much the same. I host an email list that discusses the subject and one of the regularly recurring (and, to me, infuriating) assumptions is that "the email list and the community are one and the same." Even physical communities have complex boundaries that look different from the inside, the outside, at ground level or at 50,000'. John --* --* John D. Smith, 2025 SE Elliott Ave, Portland OR 97214 --* http://home.teleport.com/~smithjd V: 503.963.8229 --* Winter '02 Online CoP Workshop starts Jan 28: www.ewenger.com/edu --* "As iron sharpens iron, so one human sharpens another" -- Hebrew proverb