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A 2008 Gartner study on social software noted that "about 70 percent of the community typically fails to coalesce." There are detrimental effects of over-hyping the technology and then committing the three cardinal sins of running a community: * If you build it they will come. This can be attributed to the lure of "social software" that companies repeatedly bite at, as opposed to seeking to extend or create value for their customers. * Once I've launched it, I'm done. Many communities launch successfully, only to fade out and disappear. Due in large part to a failure to assign ownership of the community and to have a strategy that lasts past "launch." * Bigger is better. The assumption that the overall size of a community is indicative of its success. All three can cause a community to fail, and there are plenty of examples. Understanding the community life cycle can help you avoid making these mistakes.

I was the community manager for a professional community from January 2007 through July 2008.  During that time, the community grew from zero to 4,000 members.  We were rigorous with the tracking of metrics and updated community analytics weekly through a combination of our platform reports and Google Analytics.  I was laid off in July due to financial hardship of the community sponsor, but the community doors have remained open albeit with no community management or minimal upkeep.

The Community Roundtable is a private peer network for community managers and social media practitioners. The goal of The Community Roundtable is to further the discipline of community management and provide practitioners a place to find peers, best practices, and resources to help them approach their day-to-day tasks. We are a member-based organization with an annual membership fee and we require members to be a community management or social media practitioner.

Communities of Practice (CoPs) are working to strengthen public health as members learn, share expertise, and work together on solving common problems in their communities' domains.The Communities of Practice Program, in its role of supporting CDC and the broader public health community in implementing CoPs, developed this Resource Kit to provide potential and current community leaders and members with information about CoPs and tools for community development.

Traditional approaches to community regeneration which define communities in solely geographic terms have severe limitations. They often failed to deliver on key social capital improvements such as improving trust between residents or fostering a greater sense of belonging. In this report we argue for a new approach to community regeneration, based on an understanding of the importance of social networks, such an approach has the potential to bring about significant improvements in efforts to combat isolation and to support the development of resilient and empowered communities.

We urgently need to rethink how we hire community managers. At the moment too many organizations, with little idea of what makes a great community manager, are hiring people who are either great at technology, have irrelevant community or social media experience, or have far too much free time.  This is a tragedy that's sabotaging their community efforts. It's time to rethink it.

Community Interest Companies (CICS) are limited companies, with special additional features, created for the use of people who want to conduct a business or other activity for community benefit, and not purely for private advantage. This is achieved by a "community interest test" and "asset lock", which ensure that the CIC is established for community purposes and the assets and profits are dedicated to these purposes. Registration of a company as a CIC has to be approved by the Regulator who also has a continuing monitoring and enforcement role.

Context and culture in communities of practice July 22, 2011 by jennymackness A predominant feature of BEtreat was the impact of context and culture on the learning process. There was an expectation that we would share our experience of communities of practice with a view to learning from each other. However, whilst the sharing was easy enough, the understanding of where people were coming from was more difficult. Participants came from very different backgrounds. Large corporations such as Shell, Deloitte and Microsoft represented the 'for profit' sector and within the 'not for profit' sector there were those who were working with many communities across large geographical areas and those who were working with much smaller more localised communities. The disparity in the amounts of funding received by these different communities was huge.

Community management is both art and science. As more brands integrate online community into their marketing mix, finding people with the experience, skills and understanding of the community dynamic is imperative for optimizing returns. Finding the right people with the optimal skills to lead a dynamic community has proven to be challenging at best.

The Pillar Summit's Professional Community Management Course is the first to set clear standards, provide proven methodology for building and sustaining thriving online communities, and enable quantifiable ROI. Our rigorous course combines extensive theory, detailed case studies and practical assignments to ensure you master the skills necessary to develop and manage communities on behalf of your organization or for your clients

"Fiery Spirits is a network of people, now numbering over 1,300, with an interest in making a difference in rural communities across the UK and Ireland through community-led approaches. Fiery Spirits is hosted by the Plunkett Foundation, an organisation that campaigns for community-ownership in rural areas."

Enterprise social computing has the potential to transform internal and external communications, collaboration, teamwork, processes, knowledge sharing and innovation. The big question is how to get the most from this new corporate resource this community supporting our events will show you how.

Where the community facilitator is a fundamental to the succces of the community. An on-line community without a facilitator is like having a toy without any batteries.

As the world of dominant brands becomes more fragmented, established companies and startups are hiring community managers to cultivate an engaged community in a digital world where customers' experiences with the product is amplified through social media, whether good or bad. And it's not just the experience that users value; the relationships and connections they are able to make with companies and fellow consumers are just as important.

Before Facebook became the dominant social media platform, the main task for community managers was to program forums and communications systems. A necessary side job of their data management responsibility was to act as moderator, and they often did it poorly. And today? The Facebook universe, with its intuitive user interface, makes programming and data management skills unimportant and suddenly changed the requirements for the job.

"Clusters are an an ideal online workspace solution for teams, projects, communities of interest and entire organizations. They provide: a community knowledge bank; document, photo, and media sharing; and unified communications in an integrated collaboration solution. It is easy to find people in with specific expertise and related content."

About the importance of the community facilitator in developing the environment for succesful collaboration and knowledge sharing. An on-line community without a facilitator is like having a battery-driven toy - but without the batteries!

Over the next several weeks, I'll outline over 30 of the primary reasons that private online communities fail and what companies and nonprofit organizations can do to avoid the same fate. These pitfalls and lessons are mainly rooted in our research and experience over the past 10 years providing enterprise online community software to organizations ranging from large associations to Fortune 500 companies.

"This handbook is for people developing communities of practice in government."

Connected Educators is the online home of the Connected Online Communities of Practice (COCP) project. In collaboration with a wide range of educational organizations and educators, COCP is increasing the quality, accessibility, and connectedness of existing and emerging online communities of practice