The PMI virtual community project is a major initiative aimed at bringing together the many different facets of the overall PMI members. I am not sure whether non-members will gain access, but I understand that there is a membership fee to get into this virtual community. I have some thoughts, or more to the point, questions as my curiosity about this has been piqued. Let’s take a look.
PMI has embarked upon a major project to bring together the many SIGs in related subcommunity groups within the PMI. They are taking a centralized approach to this community building effort. The community, as with most online communities, will include blogs, wikis, forums, and related social networking technologies.
What hits me about this initiative is that it seems to be so thoroughly planned that it almost defies the organic nature of social networking. Social networking infrastructures seem to grow organically based upon the interest and demands of their users. From my observations, they have grown from the bottom up and have been user-centric and demand-centric. This PMI effort hits me as being PMI-centric.
A case in point is ITToolbox.com, IT Toolbox has many different forms and did not start from a large, central, widely-spread organization that already had a community, like the PMI. As it has grown, it has spawned many communities in areas like project management, SAP, Oracle, and other community-interest areas that have simply evolved by having enough interest and response at an appropriate critical mass from among the users. These forums, blogs, white papers, and more have simply grown organically. My question is how much freedom there will truly be in the growth of the PMI virtual community? How focused and how closely monitored will these virtual communities be?
Well, much more to come. These are just initial thoughts. They were provoked in part by an excellent podcast at Cornelius Fichtner’s ThePMPodcast.com site. There is much more to come within the project management community on this coming development.
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John Reiling, PMP
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