Learning Alliances

Communities are efficient in a different way from teams, but they still need to pay attention to economics, resource leveraging and reuse. Most communities can hold a discussion on email, meet on a telephone bridge, in a chat room or face-to-face. And they need to use each one of these media in a way that supports activities held in other settings. Community leaders have a lot of choices and opportunities to use what’s produced in one venue to get things going in another. Here are some suggestions:

• Summarize a discussion to produce a higher-level starting point for the next discussion
• Bring a summary of an online web board discussion to a phone meeting or a chat
• Bring an online community directory to a face-to-face meeting
• Use a chat room of instant message session to take notes in public and post them afterwards.
• Announce all of these resources in a newsletter or a digest that encourages back-channel discussion