What is Community Development?

The CoSolvent Community Server (CCS) is designed to allow a community of otherwise unrelated stakeholders (e.g., experts, vendors, customers, and staff) to interact freely across firewalls and over physical distance.

Typically, the sponsoring organization is limited in the amount of control it can exert over this type of community. Individual stakeholders can decide whether to join, and they can choose how they will collaborate if they elect to join.

Given these challenges, iPOV recommends that the community sponsor consider implementing a "community development program" to adapt CCS to the business workflow and encourage a community culture that serves the mission and the membership. This is a somewhat different challenge from the traditional task of ‘selling’, 'getting buyin', or ‘training’ users to use a new system.

Community Development Consulting

iPOV can help clients assess community needs to deploy more effective configurations, policies, tools, and training. iPOV can also advise clients on ways to configure CCS to mesh with the client's operational workflow. Finally, iPOV can help clients to motivate, train and empower community members to participate most effectively.

The Community Development Program

iPOV's strongly recommends that every CCS system deployment should include a planned program of Community Development.