We keep coming back to the key question of how to encourage / help / incentivize busy people to capture stories of the work they do.  It's the people side of storycapture, and it's much more critical than it seems to many in the social media world.

Most social media programs and strategies assume that there is an existing stream of conversations that are already happening on SM platforms, and the goal is to leverage that stream in some way.  And of course that's often true.  But ... 

The question for a purposeful community is whether the right digital conversations are happening to support the shared agenda of the community.  In many cases, they are not.  

People doing the work of a purposeful community (helping people, running programs, traveling and talking and doing things) are often NOT the same people who sit down and write a long blog post at the end of the day about what they've just done.  Or even a short tweet.  

They're busy, they're involved, they're face-to-face people, they don't to look back but keep moving forward.  They may be very communicative but they seldom are "self-documenting".

We've found this to be true whatever the age or digital awareness of the person involved. (The problem is NOT digital vs. analog ... they are even less likely to sit down and write something on paper!)  

So we keep running up against the central challenge of "collective storytelling" and self-documenting communities ... how to get the thoughts and experiences captured in the first place.  What combination of people and technical resources, or policies and incentives and culture, will increase the percentage of stories that are captured.

We've have been asking around about this question, and not finding a lot of prior work. But we're probably missing something!

It's possible that there is good experience and suggestions on this topic in related areas.  For example:

• Communities of practice
• Social learning
• Knowledge management

 All ideas, suggestions and feedback welcome!