For the second in our series of Online Community Examples , we move on to look at online communities in the retail industry. Wal-Mart have a chaquered history with social media (the infamous Wal-Marting Across America campaign, for example), but they are doing some great things at the moment. One good example of building a small but powerful online community is Elevenmoms . Online communities in the retail industry In an economic downturn, we’re seeing a real shift in retail shopping  patterns.

Talking to people from MDF , a training and consultancy firm, we had to conclude that there are few practical examples of communities of practice in a development context, so I'll try and search harder (haven't even started the whole km4dev journal for instance). I'm not sure if there are no examples, but there may not be many well-described cases of how communities of practice were intentionally nurtured and leveraged for enhanced knowledge sharing and innovation for development. One example of a community of practice is the KM4dev community and I had the honour to to talk to Lucy Lamoureux, the coordinator, somewhere last year, about the same time of the publishment of an official interview with her in the km4dev journal She describes the Km4dev community as a group of development practitioners working in knowledge management and knowledge sharing who ask for advice and receive quick responses from peers.

As of December 2007 Jack will likely start writing about product management too. There are many forms of network In Turning Informal Networks into Formal Ones Craig Roth talks about the latest in a McKinsey Quarterly "series" on collaboration, Harnessing the power of informal employee networks by McKinsey consultants Lowell Bryan, Eric Matson, and Leigh Weiss. Craig takes the authors to task for focusing too heavily

In the On the Commons blog , Jay Walljasper makes the argument of seeing taxes as a commons, then gives the example of the use of participatory budgeting in Minneapolis : “ 8220; Taxes are actually an important element of the commons — ideally it’s a mutual of form of solving problems and pursuing opportunities that can’t be as efficiently or equitably accomplished through individualized action. So widespread resistance to paying taxes, no matter how illogical, poses a major hurdle for creating a commons-based society. To boost the commons, it is important to help people

The case describes the efforts to assist 10 huge cities in the Central American Region to improve their technical expertise and municipal effectiveness by connecting mayors and their staff into forming communities of practice. The initiative followed the move of the World Bank to become the 'knowledge bank'. Etienne Wenger wrote a case study in 2002 about Ayuda Urbana , a constellation of communities of practice focused on urban issues and challenges in Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean region, or as they call themselves: 'Red Inter-municipal'. The first focus on informational

This distinction is derived from the work on ‘triarchy’, distinguishing three forms of rule and governance,by Gerard Fairtlough, former CEO of Shell Chemicals UK and founder of biotech firm Celltech. “there are three ways of getting things done in organizations and the combination of the three is called triarchy, which means triple rule. 8221;’Heterarchical systems share power”’–for example, a board that votes to decide issues, or different branches of government that have checks and balances through separation and overlap of power. ”’Responsible

One of Paterson’s biggest criticisms concerns car driving as “a form of social exclusion”. The term ‘digital panopticon’ has often been used to describe a dystopian world of virtual surveillance through such things as web-enabled social networking sites where much information is public, or alternatively, for example, the traffic surveillance system in London whereby the public can be constantly scrutinised through the centrally monitored cameras that track people’s/vehicle’s movements on city streets. From a stimulating essay by Catherine Marie Simpson on the decline on car culture:

8220; Some remarks about the existence of “hybrid forms” and about the dynamics of these forms. The reality you describe is a hybrid social form of production, borrowing aspects from both systems, capitalism and P2P, or peer production. the output can be oriented by corporations more towards their own needs (commercial management software, for example) but the output remains universally available. I’m reproducing interesting comments from Raoul Victor on the Oekonux mailing list, who reacts to the following question/statement of mine: On 11jan09

There is not yet enough data to say whether these communities will thrive, but the idea is that the intense workshop will form a core group which will allow for expansion. I worked with CARE from 94-97 in Mali, first in Dire, then in Macina, both location at the border of the river Niger. I missed

Today we conclude with examples that incorporate the precepts Eric introduced yesterday. Examples: “Let’s now consider some examples of artifacts that exhibit characteristics of Post-Industrial design sensibility. We’ve already discussed one of the prime examples; The last of our 3-parter on post-industrial design , by Eric Hunting. Eric Hunting: