Community of practice - Definition and Overview

The organizational development (OD) concept of a community of practice (often abbreviated as CoP) refers to the process of social learning that occurs when people who have a common interest in some subject or problem, collaborate to share ideas, find solutions, and build innovations.

The term was first used in 1991 by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger who used it in relation to situated learning. In 1998, the theorist Etienne Wenger (http://www.ewenger.com/) extended the concept and applied it to a commercial setting. More recently Communities of Practice have become associated with knowledge management as people have begun to see them as ways of cultivating or nurturing new knowledge of sharing existing tacit knowledge within an organisation.

• A brief history of the concept of Communities of Practice can be found at http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/mis/KNICOP/Chapters/Introduction.html

• The relationship between CoPs and Knowledge Management is discussed in the article The Duality of Knowledge (http://informationr.net/ir/8-1/paper142.html)

• The relationship between CoPs and organizational knowledge strategy is discussed in the article Knowledge management as a doughnut: Shaping your knowledge strategy through communities of practice (http://www.knowledgeboard.com/download/3990/Knowledge-management-as-a-doughnut.pdf.pdf)

Related to

• Communities of Circumstance
• Communities of Interest
• Communities of Position
• Communities of Purpose
• knowledge management
• organizational learning
• Social network
• Virtual Community of Practice

Links

• Jean Lave, Etienne Wenger and communities of practice (http://www.infed.org/biblio/communities_of_practice.htm)
• Review of Cultivating Communities of Practice by Etienne Wenger (http://www.tlainc.com/articl45.htm)
• links to CoPs with the general theme of Nurturing Knowledge from slashdemocracy.org (http://www.slashdemocracy.org/links/Nurturing_knowledge_and_shared_practices/Communities_of_practice/index.html)

• http://home.att.net/~discon/KM/CoPs.htm - Fred Nickols, CoP pages

• http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/index.shtml
• http://www.i-km.com/linkscops.htm
• http://www.intranetfocus.com/intranets/communities.html
• http://www.knowledgeboard.com/community/zones/sig/cp.html
• http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/404/lesser.pdf
• http://www.elearningeuropa.info/doc.php?id=1483&lng=1&doclng=1

References

Lave, J and Wenger E, "Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation", Cambridge University Press, 1991

Wenger E, "Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity", Cambridge University Press, 1998