Credit, Sharing & Communities of Practice [JMO]

I loved opening up my RSS feed this morning and reading this interesting blog post from CLOC colleague, Jack Vinson, about Chris Collison and Tom Davenport and knowledge sharing. The whole post is great, but the list on "why children share" really jumped out at me.

He included this list from Davenport’s Working Knowledge on why children share:

• You share with the friends you trust
• You share when you’re sure you’ll get something in return
• Your toys are more special than anyone else’s
• You share when the teacher tells you to, until she turns her back
• When toys are scarce, there’s less sharing
• Once yours get taken, you never share again

via ctr-organizational-change.msloc.northwestern.edu

Part of working on the architecture of an intentional community of practice (like the work I'm doing with Design for America, and the past work I did with Hewitt and Houseblogs) is articulating and encouraging cultural norms driving behavior which build on the items on that list up there. Especially in DFA or Houseblogs where participation is completely voluntary, tending to the balance of give-and-take is important. Knowledge and ideas can benefit the collective, AND they also benefit the individual's reputation in the collective (and outside of the collective).

Reputation and credit might be a strange thing to pay attention to in a community of practice, but both can mean a lot to the individual in terms of access (to influential sponsors, to valuable resources, to extended opportunities) and personal motivation (to continue to share, to continue to work beyond what is expected).

Some rights reserved by Toban Black

Yet, here is the tension...right? Information wants to be free, but for people to keep feeding information and ideas into the collective pool, paying attention to credit-sharing and origins is important so that people don't begin to hoard or shut down or isolate their ideas. However, in the free-flowing exchange of information and ideas in a community of practice, how do you "tag" origins or "chain of custody" or otherwise credit the individuals in the community?  In the blogging world, you provide "link backs."  What do we do in organizations?

It doesn't seem a coincidence that the word trust and credit are synonyms for each other. And in an evolving community of practice, without trust? You will soon have no social reciprocity and, thus, no community of practice.

We could say it isn't important, that we shouldn't care about credit. Which is normally something that people with influence can afford to say. And to those people with established reputations and lots of access to resources, it becomes less important. However, for those who are still building a reputation, acknowledgment is akin to currency. Something that you can build your personal value account with and, thus, increase your access to opportunities and resources.

I'm not saying I've solved this problem, how to use cultural norms to drive credit-sharing behavior. It's just something I'm interested in and continue to investigate....