Description Among the most important agreements a reflective community of practice can make is how to allocate the various roles and responsibilities that are needed to support their work. The following descriptions of roles and responsibilities are meant for discussion purposes, not as recommendations to your community. The roles and responsibilities needed in order for your community to function efficiently and effectively will depend on its size, its prior working relationships, the complexity of the work you are doing together, and the formality with which you will be approaching your work. However, it is always better to begin with assigned roles and responsibilities and find out you don’t actually need them, than to start out without any at all and find out that the lack of formal roles is getting in the way of your work.
After reviewing the following roles and responsibilities, decide which are the most important to your community, define them clearly for your own purposes, and assign them to community members. Make these decisions a part of your community’s Agreements document, and then be sure to reflect on how they are working for you during your regular reflections.
Design Team, Coach or Facilitator Most communities working in NewWorkSpaces will already have a Design Team, Coach or Facilitator to help them get organized, plan their work, keep their momentum going, learn to function well in a virtual environment, and help coordinate meetings, phone conferences or other events that occur offline. These groups or individuals have experience in using the NewWorkSpaces Guide and working with the NewWorkSpaces collaborative technology. Therefore, they are excellent process and technology resources for helping communities move through The Commons and the four learning spaces: Discover, Invent, Experiment, and Influence. Their roles may also include:
Stimulating knowledge sharing across the community by coordinating collaboration within the community.
Monitoring community activity to ensure community responsiveness to individual member needs
Helping to create and foster a highly collaborative environment
Providing process and tool help
Providing help with group dynamics and techniques that help the community solve problems and evolve over time
Reporting out on the community’s work and progress to others, if needed or desired
Community Leader The Community Leader helps the community to determine its purpose and intentions, keeps the energy flowing, and offers support when the community needs an extra boost. Among the responsibilities the Leader might take on are:
Interfacing with the community’s Design Team, Coach or Facilitator
Acting in the role of Coach or Facilitator if the community doesn’t have one already.
Helping to organize and coordinate the startup activities for the community
Bringing in new ideas or questions when the community starts to lose energy
Encouraging active participation of members, keeping track of membership changes, and recruiting new members, when desired
Acting as a liaison with other communities
Finding additional subject matter expertise, if needed
Content Manager or Editor A Content Manager or Editor manages the knowledge base of the community, based upon the content management processes established by the community. Depending on the work that the community is doing, they may also be responsible for making sure that community members make contributions to co-created documents in a timely manner. They may also offer friendly reminders about agreements the community has made about the length of messages, emails or contributions to the community’s conversations or documents. They may also encourage members who haven’t contributed their ideas or resources to become more active. Content managers or editors:
Help to organize content in meaningful ways so that it is readily available and easily accessible to members
Manage review processes for documents or reports as they are co-created by community members
Communicate guidelines for contributing knowledge objects and initiating discussion threads to members as a means of organizing content
Community Champion Community Champions provide support for communities that have some sort of official sponsorship from an agency, foundation, or other entities that have particular interests or investments in the community’s work. Champions believe in the value of knowledge building and sharing, and help to promote the value of the community’s work to the sponsoring organization. They may also:
Provide the Design Team or Community Leader with guidance by acting as a sounding board for ideas
Bolster community membership, by spreading the word and extending invitations
Build support for the community with leaders, functional managers, and opinion leaders
Ensure that the community focuses on critical issues by monitoring the progress and outcomes achieved by the community
Advocate for the community in terms of support, resources and visibility Works with Community Leader to track progress of community.
Work with the Community Leader to track progress of the community
Subject Matter Experts Subject Matter Experts are sometimes used by communities that are focusing on a specific discipline or subject matter area in which it is important to have members with a particular knowledge or experience base. In their role they may use their knowledge of the discipline to judge what is important, groundbreaking, and useful and to enrich information by summarizing, combining, contrasting, and integrating it into the existing knowledge base. These experts may act as regular members of the community, or be called upon when their contributions are most necessary and appropriate. They often:
Assist in the identification and mapping of critical knowledge applicable to the community
Help to harvest, create or broker new knowledge
Help to establish taxonomies or classification systems for knowledge
Work with a content manager/editor to ensure that knowledge objects are relevant, valid, and the best sources
Work with a content manager/editor to refresh and expand the knowledge base
Cross reference and source information from outside the community and make it available to members
