The common good

"Technology enables community building, but does not animate it."

(Howard Rheingold, Face to Face with Virtual Communities, Syllabus Magazine, July 2001)

The other day I went to Coimbra to attend a 2-hour session on Knowledge Management. The facilitator, Ana Neves, is a University of Coimbra alumna currently working in the public health sector in the UK. The participants contributed with different points of view (from business, education, management, HR, etc.), all interested in knowing how do we really manage individual and organizational knowledge.

Some words kept coming up: share, exchange, motivate, acknowledge. In the name of that elusive goal - the common good. Someone said, the common good is my good plus the good of others. But sometimes we tend to forget one of the terms, especially the second one.

And that rang a little bell. Perceiving where the common good lies may be the first step towards forming a learning community. Maybe this common good is too abstract a concept at first - people need to wait and see what is in there for them. Then, if they perceive that the first term of the equation has been addressed, they start investing on the second. Of course it should be a win-win situation, a virtuous circle - the more I give, the more I receive in return, with value added.