The Role of Community Champions in Fostering a Successful Community of Practice

Communities of Practice are collaborative networks (can be both formal or informal) depending on to foster sharing of ideas and knowledge outside the structured learning environment.

Communities are always developed around a certain skill, profession or learning purpose. In fact, a shared identity is the glue that binds the members of a Community together (Wenger, 1998).

Community champions play a key role in fostering successful communities. Champions are recruited from the practice, so they are deeply aligned to the purpose of the specific community and are best positioned to connect members and the business to better serve the clients. They work as the bridge between the business and the knowledge management.  Champions are instrumental in ensuring that the business goals and the associated knowledge programs of the community are well-defined and met.

Listed below are the ground level responsibilities of a smart community champion:

·        Follow the community and relevant hashtags to surface the community activity to the intended audience.

·        Regularly seeds and monitor the discussions on community feed.

·        Initiates, support roll-out and facilitates community activities aligned to the business goal.

·        Monitor and provide input to ensure community content relevancy.

·        Promote community activity, campaigns, and resources across their personal network for better visibility.

·        Monitor content metrics to determine community health and suggest appropriate actions to update, retire or refresh the community.

          The list above is not exhaustive and varies with the changing business priorities. However, they define the basic guidelines for any champion role to moderate an impactful and successful community.

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