Who Owns The Community?

It's a question I get almost every time I chat with others around our internal community offering, EMC ONE. I'm always surprised at the need to assign ownership to an individual or a group... Perhaps the desire for accountability is @ the core of the question.

So, asked this morning for the umpteenth time, I thought I'd post a brief thought on the topic.

At least in my world... The Community owns the community.

Now, that's simplifying a bit. We do have a team of folks (well, two actually - one of whom is here) who are responsible for the overall health of EMC ONE. But, that's not an ownership thing... Rather they represent the collective voices from the community itself.

When it comes to creating new spaces for conversation and collaboration, the proposal is put out for the community to comment on and ultimately decide if it's the right thing to do. No formal governance team... No supreme ruler.

While the primary team manages vendor and IT relationships, it's the collective voice of the community that ultimately decides which direction we take the overall platform.

When it comes to policing and moderating content (which, btw, we've never actually had a need for), it's the community who ultimately decides the threshold of acceptable behavior. Despite strong desires by some early on to moderate *everything*, we've yet to have an instance that made us rethink our approach.

And so on...

Internal communities are still somewhat new. Unlike traditional web properties, ownership means something very different. Command and control just doesn't work any longer. It's a healthy step in online evolution, IMO.

If you try to force fit traditional ownership and governance models as you deploy your social offering, you'll likely lose the exact thing you're trying to accomplish.. The very sense of community.