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Abraham Harrison,
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Community Managers,
Community Service,
Howard Rheingold,
Jonathan Trenn,
Marketing Conversation,
OD Consultant,
Online Communications,
Online Communities,
Online Community Managers,
Online Community Outreach,
Online Conversation,
Organizational Development,
Virtual Communities,
Virtual Team
I woke up to an amazing article written by Jonathan Trenn, The fallacy of community, and I responded in a comment to a pretty passionate article and a passionate comment string, and here’s what I wrote — and I have expanded the argument below, so it is an expansion:
Gosh, I don’t know what to say here… there are so many different types of communities, many of which can surely be manufactured. What every successful community requires is community leadership. Community leadership can be organic and emergent or they can be hired in the form of online community managers or facilitators. A strong leadership — people who have skin in the game — is more important than a good web application; also, these community leaders are often the main draw to the community and can be the difference between keeping or losing your members when a competitor comes to town.
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2 Comments » Posted on July 24th, 2008 by Chris Abraham
God Bless Howard Rheingold. I am proud to personally know a true futurist, over and over again. Back in 2002, Howard wrote Smart Mobs, a book that predicts what is going on online in response to the unrest in Burma. In this case, this is called a Flash Mob. Via Guardian Unlimited & US News and World Report & US News and World Report (again).
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No Comments » Posted on September 29th, 2007 by Abraham Harrison
I love to write reviews of books I have yet to read. I work too much. Anyway, if I could choose a mentor and a guru, his name would be Howard Rheingold. Howard and I have known each other since 1999 and when he goes gaga over a book, Everything is Miscellaneous, I am his echo chamber (and David Weinberger, another of my idols, is no slouch either) :
“It took me a while to get around to reading David Weinberger’s book, Everything is Miscellaneous, but when I finally did, boy howdy, did my head and the world get rearranged. He’s one of those few writers who makes simple and funny explanations of complex phenomena look easy. And he’s onto something important. It’s not just a new story and a big picture, it’s a new picture and a big story. I think he’s right that most knowledge has been structured and so many institutions has been arranged according to taxonomies and hierarchical file structures simply because we have been arranging knowledge for thousands of years, but we only got search engines recently. Search engines are not just search engines in Weinberger’s new picture, and tagging is not just tagging.”
No Comments » Posted on July 18th, 2007 by Abraham Harrison
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