CP Square is a community of practitioners concerned with communities. They are highly regarded and recommended.

In their recent newsletter and blog, also excellent and recommended, there was this odd remark:

 For example, recently Bronwyn Stuckey, Etienne Wenger, and I have been thinking about how participation and reification show up in communities and in our workshop. We are developing summaries of each week's activities as a visible marker and transition to the next. We want to use summaries that work in a workshop setting that are also useful in an ordinary community of practice. For example, Social Network Graphs are sometimes used to think about the social structure of communities, especially when they are forming. So at the end of week one we use a graph showing how people interact in the workshop's "Opening Circle." It represents what people have been doing and provides an opportunity for reflection going forward.

They seem to be suggesting the social network analysis of a community is a reification fallacy. Really? Gasp!

Quite to the contrary, SNA is empirical. It delivers the actual nodes, links, patterns, structures, etc., that comprise the community.

What’s so often over-baked and the cause for most community failures are belief in technology hubs, distribution lists, community applications and other hubristic technology artifacts are “more real” than the social network. (?)

Network logic drives the emergence, behavior, impact and outcome of communities.

While we agree, of course, that the network map is ’not the territory,’ it is instrumental in understanding and leading communities.

Most so-called community efforts or communities-of-practice are challenged. They fail to meet expectations or simply fail outright. They primary reason for this poor record is indifference to and/or ignorance of the underlying social networks. Rather basic network comprehension sharply improves the success and outcome of community efforts. 

Organizational Network Analysis is one way to see and master communities. Videre est credere.