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176 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

this community was to spread the experience of interacting differently so that there
could be real change in the organization as a whole.
Ongoing coaching: In one of the oil companies studied, communities begin with a
half day ‘boot camp’ in which the community leader and core members were intro-
duced to the key elements of community, the goal-setting and assessment process,
and the critical success factors for communities in that company.

The full report of this study is available in www.ki-network.org

>> ONLINE COMMUNITIES
Much of our discussion of social networks up to this point has been based on
a traditional view of social relationships. They are normally seen as emerging
from face-to-face interactions within a particular physical context. However, the
advent of the Internet and other ICT systems has enabled new networks to
develop amongst groups who are geographically dispersed and unable to com-
municate through face-to-face contacts. We now recognize that social relation-
ships and even communities can equally well develop through online as well as
face-to-face interactions. There are now many different types of online commu-
nity. Some, such as the Ebay community, are very narrowly focused and trans-
actional, simply helping their members buy and sell goods. Others are centred
on shared life experience, such as communities of cancer sufferers, or people
who have experienced divorce or infertility. Finally, another set, such as social
networking groups or online gaming communities, are concerned with promot-
ing social interaction.
Some of the earliest examples of online community, however, were focused on
work and came from within large, geographically dispersed organizations who
had both the infrastructure and shared work problems to make online interac-
tions meaningful. Many of the managed communities highlighted above, for
example, have been developed as online networks by large multinational compa-
nies which have employees dispersed across many sites around the world.
One such example comes from Xerox – the company which had originally proved
so resistant to the emergent communities within its midst. The group of reps which
Orr studied within Xerox included about a dozen people, but the total number of
such reps within the company numbered around 25,000 worldwide. The lack of
communication across this workforce meant that different groups were grappling
with problems which had already been solved elsewhere. To overcome this problem
and connect these different communities, Xerox initiated the ‘Eureka’ project to
oversee knowledge dissemination. The aim was to create a database which would
preserve useful ideas and learning points and make them available globally.
Clearly, there was a danger here, as noted in Chapter 7, of technology being
viewed as a solution rather than a support to knowledge work. Many knowledge
databases are underutilized by the people they are intended to serve. This is
often because they are designed top-down with little reference to what users
see as useful knowledge. In the case of the Eureka database, the development

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