Community spaces

More and more communities are setting up collaborative websites in one form or another. It's a great way for communities of interest or practice to share ideas, knowledge and news. We are working on nurturing a community of practice based on better performance management in partnerships. It's early days for us (Day 2, in fact) but here are a few community of interest or practice sites that look good: PurpleOcean, a labour union site, and the North Carolina Democratic Party site.

But there are other types of communities, too....

A local wiki for local people
It's also a great way for geographic communities to share ideas about matters of local interest. Councils and city and county governments have long had web sites with information for their users. Some are little interactive (you can pay for stuff!) but very few are truly participative.

However, there is a small but growing grass roots movement of collaborative web sites for communities. There are some community based wikis (collaborative websites built by users for users) around, but it's still a relatively new concept. E-democracy is a US based initative that has wikis for some cities in Minnesota, but also has areas for the London Borough of Newham and Brighton & Hove. To be fair, the wiki concept hasn't quite taken off in Newham and Brighton, but their community message boards seem to be doing well (see Newham's here and Brighton and Hove's here).

Knoxville, Tennessee already has a rich tradition in online communities and has a brand new collaborative website: Knoxviews. Recent discussions focus on the local education budget, a controversial religious resolution before the city council (since dropped) and reorganisation of the fire department. The site runs on software called CivicSpaces that's designed to encourage community and grassroots engagement.

e-democracy in the UK
There's also an e-democracy project based in the UK and sponsored by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister - with a host of case studies and interesting practice for citizen forums and councillor blogging. There's even a specific case study about e-democracy and partnership consultation.

In my next post, I'll write about blogging - another, slightly less participative way, to share views about communities of practice, interest or geography.