What is the difference between Organizations, Social/Business Networks and Communities of Practice (CoPs)?

Man is a social animal. We need to interact with each other, whether its business or daily life. This helps us to develop relations and build up our trust in others. The basic concept behind all human networking platforms is to increase interaction between every kind of people so that we get to know them better.

Organization

People grouped together to pursue a common purpose or aim are part of an organization. It is an administrative or functional body with a hierarchical structure where everyone is designated with some responsibility. Each one has to work with in his jurisdiction.

Examples of organizations include:

UNO, NATO, OIC,

Social networks

A network is an interconnected chain, group or system. For example, a network of computers helps data to flow from one terminal to another. Similarly, in a social network, people connect with their friends, relatives and companions and form a network. This can help them to connect with their friends and also each other's friends. This way, they can increase their network of friends. As a social network help to develop a relation, like wise it also gives people opportunities to get jobs. Before the introduction of internet, people interacted with few people whom they knew, but after the development of social networking site, we get to know thousands of people with a single click. We can share information, pictures, events, emotions and experiences. This has given birth to a new concept of 6 degree of separation which is based on the experiment done by Jeffrey Travers and Stanley Milgram. (1969) the basic idea is that every person in the world is connected to the other with just 6 people between them.

As par business is concern, social networking sites earn money by advertising different products in the form of banners and this is a very profitable business which is rapidly growing.

Some common social networking sites:

Bebo, Orkut, Pownce, Facebook, Hi5, My Church, MySpace, You tube, linked In.

Business Network

Business network is same kind of network which helps to increase the business relation and circle of trust among business associates. We want to do business with person whom we trust and feel safe and business network is method to increase that trust and help use to develop contact and nerchering relationship which help our business to grow.

Communities of Practice

The word community is very common in our daily life .The dictionary meaning on community is "A group of people living in a particular local area" [1]

According to this definition people living in an area are community, student in one class, co-worker working in a factory or office are community. But if we talk about Communities of practice which is a new term, then immediately we get a picture that it could be people living and working together, sharing comment place and helping each other in different way become the Community of Practice. But actually the definition is quite different. According to Etienne Wenger" A community of practice is a group of people who share an Interest in a domain of human endeavour and engage in a Process of collective learning that creates bonds between them: a tribe, a garage band, a group of engineers working on similar problems." [2]

It is the collection of likeminded people grouped together to achieve a common goal but they could be from same or different knowledge backgrounds and each member has its own distinct identity within the group .A person could be the part to many communities of practice.

Implementation in our organization

VOSAPA inc. is a Mobile Phone Retail Company. All the partners are group together to from an organization to achieve our Business goal.

We introduce a social networking technique in our organization. A web portal Express to decrease social barriers within employees and management. We implement many traditions such as when an employ is hired he or she have to fill their profile with contain their basic information, education and experience. It is a sort of formal introduction of every employ with others members of organization. We encourage our employees to post articles and pictures about their families and their pervious experiences and any view about business Strategies and plans. We also implement internal web messaging service MExperss which help in communicating within a department and among retail stores, warehouses and different offices spread across country.

To implement business network technologies we have our business portal BIZExperss which connect all our mobile phone suppliers, office accessories suppliers, logistic services and recruitment ageneses. BIZExperss is a great opportunity for us to grow our business and help other companies to understand our business. This portal also help our partners companies to spread their business by discussing new aspect of their business and introducing new ventures and customers can get confidence on supplier through word of mouth and build strong relations with the help of our BIZExperss.

These are the small initiatives which VOSAPA inc. took in the context of community of practice within our organization and among our business partners. We are building relationships and bringing peoples together to form a nourishing community which will help peoples and business.

References

1. Reviewed from Google on 23 January 09 definition linked to http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=community )

2.Etienne Wenger (http://www.ewenger.com/theory/index.htm viewed on 23/01/09).