The key organiser of the community of practice is likely to be a highly visible person. They may be one in the person as the community head or leader, but many times they’re the person orchestrating the community on behalf of the figurehead leader, if I may call them that to distinguish the roles. You’re likely to see the organiser or organisers chairing, hosting and facilitating community meetings, moderating community discussions, and editing the community news.
However, there’s another mode in which they can operate, with equal validity, and that is one step behind the scenes. When the community organiser does this they’re finding other people to host the meetings, other people to chair and moderate discussions, other people to edit the news – other people from the broad community membership, on a rotating and ‘guest’ basis. The community leader themselves may lose a little bit of profile and presence, but the gain is the increased involvement of the broader membership.
It’s tempting to see this as ‘sharing the workload’ and it can have that effect. However, there’s significant community building effort involved in getting other people engaged and committed. This route is likely to be more of a qualitative value improvement than an actual time and effort saving in community organisation – and that’s the kind of benefit we should be looking for.
AI4KM - Robert Taylor 