Communities of biologists request for help
Tim Thomas contacted me in regards cultivating communities of practice for people in the natural sciences, biologists in particular. If you've got any suggestions, please contact him at tnt.thomas AT gmail DOT com.
I'm looking to exchange ideas and thoughts with anyone who's involved in any CoP whose Domain is "natural resource" sciences, biologists mainly. I'm helping a CoP get started in Northern Canada. They would like to influence decisions on what areas of wilderness will be protected by generating knowledge from about birds, bears, fish, trees etc.
I know this is pretty esoteric, so I would be more than happy to discuss pro/con and things to look out for with pretty much anyone who built a CoP.
I've already recommended that he check out the various YahooGroups that cover the topic of communities (com-prac). Where else should he look? Does anyone have direct suggestions?
3 Comment(s)
said:
I'm a little behind in my blog reading, but does he know about SEEK? It's a wiki with resources for ecoinformatics and I think one of the goals is community. http://seek.ecoinformatics.org/Wiki.jsp?page=WelcomeToSEEK
Also, I looked a bit at CoP in the sciences and in engineering -- designers need to design in sociability as well as usability. Also, depending on the actual field and its proximity to industry, there might need to be more rules for who gets to participate and how contributions are moderated. So, for example, many areas of physics have a long standing tradition of sharing data/info/knowledge where most areas of chemistry (esp. pharma) are quite leary of talking outside the lab in substantive terms. I don't know specifically about natural resource managers, but I would assume they'd be more into sharing. All we learned about informal scholarly communication before online communities still applies. Jenny Preece has done the main work on designing sociability into online communities. She's also looked at the role of lurkers. HTH. Some of this is discussed on our fledgling CoP for learning about CoPs: http://128.8.224.227/tikiwiki/tiki-page.php?pageName=index
Great Links, Christina! I've not seen SEEK and it looks like a good example of a wiki. I think these particular biologists may be interested in the wiki structure as a means of capturing knowledge as they go along.
I hope you other link helps with the distributed nature of the CoP and the issue of lurkers. I'll dig in this weekend!
Cheers,
Tim Thomas
Perhaps this should be a KM class project this quarter. Put all those eager minds to work!