On Fri, Jan 24, 2003 at 05:34:52PM -0800, Jack Park wrote: (01)
> The chapter is clearly a worth read. I think it presents some useful
> insights into the nature of communities such as this one. (02)
On Jack's recommendation, I checked out this book and read the
chapter, and I second his recommendation. Brown and Duguid introduce
Marshall's thesis, which says, as communication technology gets better
and cheaper, industries globalize, and clusters disappear.
Communication technology sure is better than it was in the 1890s, when
Marshall was doing his work, and industries certainly have globalized,
but clusters are not going away. Silicon Valley is the prime example
of that. Brown and Duguid try to explain why. (03)
I won't go into the details of their argument here, because it's not
relevant to the original thread. Brown and Duguid do talk about
"communities of practice," which they differentiate from "networks of
practice." A team of Java developers within a company would be the
former; all of the Java programmers in the world would be the latter. (04)
It's an interesting and important distinction, and I think it explains
some of the frustration that often pops up on online forums. People
treat these online forums as communities rather than networks (in the
Brown and Duguid senses of the words), and they measure progress by
those standards. The problem is that within communities, you have a
strong base of shared understanding, shared expectations, and shared
practices, whereas within networks, you have all of those things to a
lesser degree. (05)
-Eugene (06)
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