I have been wanting to start sharing my thoughts about leading online communities based on what I have observed in the industry and learned in the PhD program at Eastern. But honestly, I didn’t want to do that until I was certain I had passed my comprehensive exams and was officially a candidate. A candidate doesn’t mean that I have the PhD. It means that I have proven that I know the subject matter of Leadership and Research well enough that I can start the dissertation process.
So, now that I am ‘in’ the dissertation process and reading just about everything I can get my hands on within my topic, the best way for me to get it into the real world is to make sure I understand it well enough to see the applications and share them with real people. It would be tempting for me to use AI in order to do this writing. But, I think that for now, I will just write this myself with no help from the AI.
That said, I do use AI to help immerse myself in a topic. I have found tools like NotebookLM very handy for getting up to speed on things where synthesis is required.
My topic, broadly defined, is the intersection of two broad themes: necessity entrepreneurship, which means pretty much what you might think it means by hearing the words used together and online communities of practice. If you guessed at what an online community of practice is you’d probably be right. There is nothing inherently academic or erudite about the terms. I am looking at what it takes to lead them so that entrepreneurs feel as if they are more successful.
So that is what my writings will be about (mostly).
Because I need to be reading and writing on a daily basis, putting my thoughts here will help to be in the habit of writing and to finish my dissertation. I haven’t written on a daily basis for a long time mainly because the business I do requires me to produce videos, not so much to do writing. When I sit in that chair where I home office is, my brain is wired to start recording. But I will be retraining it to stop long enough to interpret what I am reading to what I do every day.
My topics probably chose me more than I chose them. But even in that, the term “necessity entrepreneur” describes many of the customers that I work with on a daily basis. “Online Communities of practice” are part of the means for working with them. So, when it comes to studying this topic, I will have insights that could only come from the decades I have spent working as an online information and expertise marketer.
And what is interesting is that many of the things that I have experienced and see customers and peer experienced has been studied by academics and social scientists. And that is what I will be sharing in these pages, but I’ll be sharing them not just as a ‘PhD Candidate, but as someone who lives it every day. I won’t be able to easily do that in the academy, but I can certainly do it here.
