Technology for Communities

In the report Technology for communities, the authors introduce a person who takes the role of maintaining, supporting, and introducing technology to a community; the authors refer to this person or group as the technology steward (Wenger, White, Smith, & Rowe, 2005, p. 3). If a community is small, there may be only one or two people necessary to support the community’s technology, but if the community is larger in size, it may need a small group of people to maintain the technology. A technology steward has three major items to address: identify and understand new technologies that the market introduces, select community relevant technologies for use in the community’s everyday activities, and finally, monitor the ways a community does or does not utilize the tools and also monitor the uses that members discover for the chosen technologies that were not previously introduced to them (Wenger et al., 2005, p. 3).

There are millions of technologies to choose from, but almost every single one of them involves a network. The technology steward must make sure that all members have access to a network that is sufficient for the technology he wants to incorporate. For example, a web-based meeting may work great for someone in the United States who has access to high bandwidth links, but for someone in a second world country, they may not be as fortunate to have access to high speed Internet and the meeting would be worthless. Since the bandwidth is low, the member on the other side of the world would have to wait for an extremely long time for voice and video to update and appear. This would take the effectiveness out of the meeting. Other items that are built around a network are web sites, newsgroups, chat rooms, e-mail, calendars and scheduling, and centralized storage; these are all important features necessary for a healthy distributed community (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002, pp. 76-80).

To keep a distributed community healthy, there is a great dependence on technology and equipment. Would the technology steward support, update, and maintain the technology or would the community rely on the organization's infrastructure? For example, would it be more practical for the community to have its own database vice sharing one with the organization?

Wenger, E., McDermott, R, & Snyder W. M. (2002). Cultivating communities of practice: A guide to managing knowledge. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Wenger, E., White, N., Smith, J. D., & Rowe, K. (2005). Technology for communities.