The text is accessible, timely and stands out from vapid books written by self-acclaimed social networking gurus, and steers clear of technology features or trends with a predictably limited shelf life. Instead, Dr. Howard uses a number of examples, many of which span diverse domains ranging from gaming to higher education, to elucidate how people will interact, socialize, and collaborate with each other when provided a fertile opportunity and motivation to do so.

Predictably, Dr. Howard’s guidelines for communities across domains, industries, and audiences are not meant to be a one-size-fits-all solution. For example, we see such a divergence when determining how people within enterprise communities find and share documents, answer questions, or otherwise collaborate online.

Specifically, when discussing remuneration, Dr. Howard recommends most community managers or administrators shouldn’t provide or curate an archive of knowledge “if they want to ensure the long-term health of their communities” (74). His argument, at first glance, is understandable: if community members or the general public can simply find and download materials they seek, there’s little need to contribute to the discussions and activity ongoing inside the community. Dr. Howard reiterates “public archives are only good for the people who want to get in, get their answers, and get out without giving anything back to the community” and ultimately risk silencing the community by “bottling it up in an archive” (75).

But in the workplace, enterprise or not, people don’t always have time or interest to ask a question and wait for a follow up response that may or may not adequately address the original question. An archive or repository of frequently accessed documents provides the community member more time to dedicate to his or her job, and focuses the activity within the community on more valuable collaboration.

For instance, providing an archive shifts activity in the community from simply asking where documents are to generating activity on the contents of the document itself. People can add comments or create discussions about the document rather than simply asking the community where the document can be found, whether it’s the latest version or not, or if it was warmly received by management.

In addition, an archive provides community members with validated, authoritative content. The knowledge seeker trusts the document’s official status (rather than an outdated draft) and can feel comfortable referring to the document in further work.

Conversely, some people may want to find different approaches of a similar document across different communities. While this is certainly what Dr. Howard refers to as not giving back to each community, the value of predictably, consistently finding information across communities is still a success for the knowledge seeker and the business.

Some social software providers recommend that after the same question has been asked over email or in a discussion thread that the topic be addressed in a blog post, wiki, or a sticky discussion thread for future access. Often these vendors also have tagging functionality to assist in future findability by community members.

In other instances, similar to those I see in my workplace, an archive is critical to even launch a community in the first place. At my current employer, many community members are published, well-known experts in their field, whether that field is pharmacology, animal health, chemistry or biology. Providing an archive allows these experts to share documents within their communities without constantly being hounded for the same documents over and over again, and frees up these experts’ time to cooperate on important topics. Such archives were a condition to even consider generating communities across the enterprise.

Dr. Howard rightly states archiving content stifles collaboration before it can start, in some cases. But in the enterprise, enabling self-assistance via archives and repositories leads to more productive, efficient communication within communities, and empowers the employee to find his or her own answers. Consequently, focusing the activity within enterprise communities should lead to greater adoption, activity, and employee engagement.

The magazine is an open collective talking, sharing and finding answers about the interaction between people and products, systems or processes.

McCullough himself said that while new reviews have been limited (which is understandable for a 5 year old text),  few reviews have been “this helpful”.

Read the complete review and other insightful articles by such authors as Jeroen Van Geel, Will Evans, Adrian Chan and Steve Baty at Johnny Holland Magazine.