Building a caring, sharing virtual community in the regions

You can’t have a successful, caring, sharing virtual community in the world of regional Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) unless you first have the real thing.

That’s the carefully arrived at view of Deakin University’s Dr Cecil Mason who has just been awarded her PhD after looking at how Information and Communications Technology can best facilitate knowledge sharing and innovation in regional areas.

“The Federal Government has been focussing in putting in place a lot of infrastructure in regional areas to facilitate knowledge sharing through ICT,” Dr Mason said.

“In large corporations, there is a lot of sharing of ideas among employees so there is this huge bank of information that people can draw on.

“In the regions, among small to medium enterprises, that sort of information is not so readily available within one organisation, but if you can draw a range of businesses together and provide them with the right facilities, they can share ideas on how to do business better.

“My primary goal then was to understand the value that ICT-based business networks can provide in regional areas. It was important to see the issues through the eyes of the business owners, and to incorporate the views of others in the regions.

“So I spent a lot of time speaking to people in two regions which I have named Camrooka and Boonaburra.

“What my researched showed very clearly is that in the regions where there was lots of face to face sharing, people were quite willing to share online, even when the infrastructure they had to do that sharing was limited, which was the case in the region I called Camrooka.

“Boonaburra, the other region involved in my research, had an excellent web-site but they were very reluctant to share information even in face to face inter-action.

“So you can put the infrastructure in place, but you must have the social capital if you are going to get the best out of it.

“People first had to develop a certain level of trust, one first developed by a lot of face to face interaction, before they would share ideas on the web.

“Where they did have that level of trust, they were more than willing to do so.”

An interesting sidebar to Dr Mason’s research was that business was attracted to Camrooka, the region that had the most social capital but the more limited ICT infrastructure.

“A number of business people I spoke to actually came to the region because of that social capital,” she said. “They saw it as dynamic and supportive.

“Not one business had been attracted to the Boonaburra region with the more sophisticated ICT structure, but no sense of a real community.

“Interestingly, there was also a high turnover of young people in Boonaburra’s network. It seems they didn’t feel part of the community, and so rapidly moved on.

“That was not the case in Camrooka.

“So the take home message is that governments have to work on developing social capital otherwise it is useless to put in ICT infrastructure, simply it is not just have enough to put in these whiz bang facilities and walk away.

“There is no doubt that if trust is developed, people are willing to share their strategies and innovative ideas for the overall benefit of the whole community, not just their own enterprise.”

For further information on Dr Mason, visit:
http://www.deakin.edu.au/buslaw/management-marketing/staff/mason.php

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