The core of the story is the difference between a result/ practice oriented community and a community of interest. Every time when you make this distinction, you find yourself in between, as reality is always nuanced. We prefer thinking of polarities rather than absolute concepts: interest oriented community and result oriented community as a continuum
An error on our side has been to focus on the 3 cases on which we see very clearly practical activity at the group level – OpenInsulin, WeMake prototyping, and maybe Traumatour.
We share a misgiving about having had to ignore many stories to look at something practical which can be captured objectively by some analytic frames. Many projects which come on Edgeryders are communities which are result oriented in themselves, whether or not the form of the conversation in opencare is directly aimed at that.
If the original poster / author has a community of practice already, what support can opencare bring to that community?
The stories we have shouldn’t be an end point in our analysis.
In the broader opencare framework, this is still an intuition, but: it’s unreasonable to start with creating a platform with the intention of being an organizing tool for people willing to coordinate themselves. The society is an ecosystem where people have networks and a language of their own – so given an image of an ecosystem for which opencare can be a support element is more complex than something which can be provided by one platform. To talk about opencare means we have to see some different groups which interact and generate (hopefully) some positive results.
What we still need to flesh out once we do the analytical work with stories:
- The theoretical background remains to be established – what constitutes a community
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The role of community management and coordination to trigger positive outcomes - What one considers “action” in the context of conversations and communities