Communities of Expertise

What does Maven do?

We organize communities of expertise and provide the tools needed to discover and acquire the professional knowledge within those communities. Here is a short video that explains how it works…

In case you’re wondering, communities of expertise are groups of professionals who share one or more common traits. A group of emergency physicians could be a community, as could be the employees of a company or the alumni of a particular university. At Maven, we spend a lot of our time figuring out these types of connections and working with our customers to organize private communities that are relevant to them. We call these private groups “Knowledge Communities.”

Our Global Knowledge Marketplace is also a community of expertise, and some of the tools we’ve built help us to subdivide that very large community into smaller groups like “marketing professionals in Africa” and “equine veterinarians” and “former employees of Sun Microsystems.” There are many thousands of communities and they overlap quite a bit, so we’ve built other tools to help us route our customers’ inquiries to the communities most likely to be able to help. Finally, our microconsulting and extended consulting tools connect people so they can share knowledge and solve problems.

As a Maven participant you are probably part of many communities of expertise without even knowing it! Our system analyzes the information you provide about your professional skills and experience, and automatically assigns you to communities. As you participate in Maven and we learn more about you through things like your Electronic Survey responses and Virtual Ideation Panel contributions, you get assigned to even more communities. Over time you may also be invited to join specific communities based upon your connections and capabilities.

What matters most, though, is not how many communities belong to, but rather that we continue to present you with opportunities that are relevant to you.