Relevant resources; Communities & Networks

Because Peers fosters the dynamic creation of (temporary) networks and communities, it is important to understand the basic rules and theories that exist about them. Communities exist in many different forms; they can be online and offline, top-down managed or bottom-up organized, large and small, about different subjects, and within an organization or inter-organizational. Peers will mostly foster the creation of communities and temporary networks within organization or existing network, but in a later stage, it may also connect people with others outside the existing boundaries. The idea behind Peers is that it enables people to connect with resources (both human and informational) within specific contexts. This creates a network, which may evolve in being a community around a certain practice or problem. This will then dissolve whenever the problem is solved, or because of any other reason.

Etienne Wenger can be described as the most important theorist on the concept of Communities of Practice. On his homepage, he explains this concept in clear terms. Martin Kloos finished his "Master Thesis on Comm.unities.of.prac.tice 2.0 - How blogs, wikis, and social bookmarking offer facilities that support learning in practice in communities of practice", which gives a good introduction to CoP's, Web 2.0 and learning theories.

"The community is the network. There is no centralized place that constitutes community, there are only people, and resources, that are distributed, that are all acting on their own behalf and in their own interests where the network consists of a set of self-selected relations using a variety of contextual information, that I've defined as third party metadata, to establish meaning, and where this meaning not only defines the community but emerges from the community." (Downes)

Stephen Downes explains how RSS, through community and automatically generated (third-party) metadata, in combination with author-information about his/her network (such as FOAF), will create an emergent community of resources (both human and informational). Also a criticism on tagging as the way to organize information.

David Wiley explains the need and working of "Open Self-Organizing Online Social Systems".

This article on Sitepoint shows some tips on how to turn lurkers into posters.. or.. how to turn passive community members or visitors into contributors.