Some years ago when I took over as the chair of the Society for Computers and Law (SCL) – an organisation I thoroughly recommend if you are interested in the law and IT – we debated our purpose and raison d’etre. We needed some frame of reference to determine the organisation’s priorities.
We concluded that we were above all a community for professionals interested in IT and the law and this realisation informed how we could take the society forward. By community what we had in mind was very much the traditional definition of the word:
The condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common (the English Oxford Living Dictionary).
The absence of any sense of community in an organisation or team within it is I suggest potentially very damaging and potentially destructive, even to professional people like lawyers and doctors who it could be argued have to work alone to some extent. However, I think that we all still need contact with our colleagues and the opportunity to both collaborate with peers and in turn to educate and learn from others.
A Harvard Business Review article suggests we need a community more than a network:
The internet is great for spreading information and rallying crowds, but you can’t mobilize people to collaborate and create something of lasting value simply by connecting them via the web. To get serious results from a network, you need commitment and a continuity of relationships among the participants.
These days creating a sense of community in a remotely networked world with homeworking and Skype may be challenging but it is essential for a sense of common purpose and just general well-being.
And this is not just about professional teams or societies. See, for example, this article entitled A fundamental human need for community may be the next big opportunity for marketers in which Adam Bain the chief operating officer of Twitter is quoted as saying: “the audience isn’t just connected to devices, but to each other,”.
As the English poet John Donne writes so eloquently:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.
We concluded that we were above all a community for professionals interested in IT and the law and this realisation informed how we could take the society forward. By community what we had in mind was very much the traditional definition of the word:
The condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common (the English Oxford Living Dictionary).
The absence of any sense of community in an organisation or team within it is I suggest potentially very damaging and potentially destructive, even to professional people like lawyers and doctors who it could be argued have to work alone to some extent. However, I think that we all still need contact with our colleagues and the opportunity to both collaborate with peers and in turn to educate and learn from others.
A Harvard Business Review article suggests we need a community more than a network:
The internet is great for spreading information and rallying crowds, but you can’t mobilize people to collaborate and create something of lasting value simply by connecting them via the web. To get serious results from a network, you need commitment and a continuity of relationships among the participants.
These days creating a sense of community in a remotely networked world with homeworking and Skype may be challenging but it is essential for a sense of common purpose and just general well-being.
And this is not just about professional teams or societies. See, for example, this article entitled A fundamental human need for community may be the next big opportunity for marketers in which Adam Bain the chief operating officer of Twitter is quoted as saying: “the audience isn’t just connected to devices, but to each other,”.
As the English poet John Donne writes so eloquently:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.
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