Community of practice

As we are working on the Logistics Portal, more and more ideas start popping up.

It is 4 am in the morning, and I'm reflecting on what just happened tonight.

We were having a technical problem with one of the news feeds (one of those things that display the "Latest News" on a website. I just could not figure it out. I went on the Internet and found a discussion forum specializing in "feeds".

I posted a message.

I take in a google news feed. In the Google news feed, the title is duplicated. How do I remove that?

Two hours later I got an answer from a guy, called HapDaniel. A guy I don't know. Don't know what he does for a living, nor where he lives. Never heard of him.

His answer was:

Try this: In [item.description] replace [(?s)^(?(?=.*?<a.*?<img)(.*?</a>.*?)|(.*?))<a.*?</a>.*?</font><br>] with [$1] (omit all outer []s).

Now this is all gibberish to you, as much as it is to me. But I tried it, without knowing what I did, and... it worked.

What is the lesson learned?
I had a problem, reached out to an Internet discussion forum, and asked a question in the void. From the void, the answer came and solved my problem. In two hours time.

In technical terms, we call these forums tools for "Communities of Practice".

My question to you is: what is the Community of Practice for logistics officers, our prime target for the Portal? Where do you, as a logistics officer in the field, turn to if you have a problem? How do you do that?

Where do you ask for "contacts in Dar es Salaam port"? Where do you find "the spare part for a Clark oil pump in Ouagadougou"? Where do you turn to if you want to know "who has experience with trucking company XYZ in Goma"?

You turn to people you know, probably. How? Call them up, email them? How fast do you get an answer? And what if you get no answer?

So where is that Community of Practice, where you Email a question, read by thousands of logisticians all over the world, and attended to by "those in the know"?

I don't think it exists.

That is one of the things we want to accomplish with the new Logistics Portal... Build that Community of Practice, and give it the tools it needs to function. So we can concentrate on stuff that is really important in our job. Our humanitarian goals. Rather than "where to find a fuel pump in Ouagadougou.