Working the room

Late last year, a vociferous email exchange with John "Pinko Fluffy Bunny" Maloney led to his sending me a very interesting paper on Intensional NetWORKS by Bonnie Nardi, Steve Whittaker & Heinrich Schwarz which I have just got around to reading.

BN et al make the observation that many workers no longer ply their trade in stable, long term teams but must pull together individuals known to them in their personal networks to achieve their goals. These intensional networks are contrasted with less personalised knotworks & more sustained / shared Communities of Practice - enough exposition, read the paper already.

What is noteworthy is that such networks are both casual and maintained. They are radial wheels of weak ties that busy professionals occasionally nurture - more like a hardy houseplant than a needy puppy.

The paper predates much of the noise about social networking software but it makes an engaging interplay with this recent post on communities & networks by Dave Pollard. DP notes that most Communities of Practice are nothing of the sort. I see where he's going with this and partially agree. CoPs in many organisations do not offer the traditional emotional comforts of an authenic community (just like mamma used to make) and there doesn't seem to be much practicing going on in a lot of them. However, the entities badged as CoPs do offer learning (what, who & how) opportunities for participants outside "trad" training programs of classrooms & textbooks - and this is a good thing.

DP also holds that We should recognize networks as the fragile, opportunistic creations they are and that We need to be careful of how much time and energy we invest in our 'networks'. Again I agree. But as BN et al indicate, for many of us, they are part of how we get our jobs done.

As Jack Vinson notes about LinkedIn, if you go there hoping for a hectic social whirl, you'll be disappointed. But there are other places to go for a social life (even a Second Life if you really want that). All LinkedIn offers is a peek into someone else's Rolodex - you show me yours & I'll show you mine. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.