Starting up a new community

Approach

By joining one or more of the government CoPs, federal employees can:

• Achieve White House strategic goals through coordinated efforts across the CoP.
• Consult a network of experts at any time
• Improve existing shared services and tools
• Improve shared performance outcomes
• Institutionalize the roles and responsibilities for innovation within agencies
• Provide professional development opportunities for members to enhance or learn new skills
• Reduce costs related to training, shared resources, and professional development
• Use each other’s strengths to produce a mutually beneficial solution

Agencies benefit when their employees join government communities of practice because the CoP can:

• Connect people across the government who might not otherwise be able to
• Inspire new ideas from cross-agency interactions and collaborations
• Build shared solutions by leveraging subject-matter expertise
• Learn from each other in a forum where conversations can produce solutions and provide a network for mentoring and coaching opportunities.
• Share resources and best practices including educational development tools for member knowledge and development.

Actions and Considerations

If you’re deciding whether to start a CoP, ask yourself these questions:

• What problem are you trying to solve?
• Does anyone else in the government have the same problem?
• Is anyone currently working to solve this problem?
• Is a community of practice the ideal way to solve this problem? Should we keep a formal group together for future collaborations?
• Is there a subject-matter expert available to set up and grow the community?

Follow these steps when deciding to setup and maintain a government CoP:

• Explore: Identify the audience, purpose, goals, and vision. Reach out to others within a community for lessons learned and shared resources.
• Plan: Define the activities, technologies, group processes, and roles that will support the community's goals. Use all the resources and guidance of existing government community of practice hubs such as Digital.gov.
• Launch: Distribute the new community of practice to the designated government agency and engage all new members with upcoming activities and benefits. Promote the community to other communities.
• Grow: Engage members in learning and knowledge-sharing activities, group projects, and networking events to create a cycle of participation and contribution.
• Sustain: Review and assess the knowledge and products created within the community for future strategies, goals, and technologies. Use short surveys to prioritize the next steps.

Successful communities measure their accomplishments on predetermined outcomes, community maturity, or other factors. However, elements of community success such as learning about best practices, knowledge transfer, and building government-wide solutions are intangible and impossible to quantify.

To measure properly, include metrics for both tangible and intangible outcomes, whenever possible. Here are some ways to measure both outcomes:

Tangible outcomes:

• Number of members, discussions, interactions, posts to a forum, and finished deliverables
• Website analytics (pageviews, returning visitors, file downloads, etc.)
• Social media analytics (if applicable)

Intangible outcomes:

• Transfer knowledge within the community
• Track the networking of peers and experts to easily answer questions
• Post success stories