Online Communities
topic
Online communities as creative inputs provide access to the practitioner knowledge, creative output, methodological discussion, and peer feedback of communities of practice in virtually any domain — with the aggregated wisdom of large communities of practitioners working through similar problems producing the emergent intelligence of collective problem-solving that no individual practitioner can replicate.
Role
Online communities are the most scalable access point to the tacit knowledge of practitioner communities outside one's own domain — with the detailed, specific, experience-driven knowledge that practitioners share in forums, subreddits, Discord servers, and specialized platforms providing more operationally detailed and more honestly problematized insight than the published literature on any topic. The creative practitioner who lurks in the practitioner communities of domains outside their own gains access to the specific problems, failed approaches, and emergent best practices of communities that are actively solving problems in real time.