Communities of Practice, Learning as a Social System by Etienne Wenger

Map Branches

• Defining Communities of Practice
  • A community of practice implies shared practice
  • A CoP defines itself along 3 dimensions:
    • What it is about
    • How it functions
    • What capability it has produced
  • CoPs move throug different stages of development
  • CoPs develop around things that matter to people
    • CoPs are fundamentally self-organized systems
  • A CoP has identity as a community and thus shapes the identities of its members.
  • A community of practice is different from a network in the sense that it is "about" something, not just a set of relationships.
  • A CoP exist because it produces a shared practice as members engage in a collective process of learning.
• Importance of Communities to Organizations
  • CoPs become crucial to those that recognize knowledge as a key asset.
  • They are nodes for the exchange and interpretation of information.
  • They can retain knowledge in "living ways"
  • They provide homes for identities
  • CoPs structure an organization's learning in two ways
    • through the knowledge thy develop at their core
    • through interactions at their boundaries
• Developing and nurturing CoPs
  • Leardership must have intrinsic legitimacy in the community.
  • In order to legitimize the community as a place for sharing and critical knowledge, recognized experts need to be involved in some way, even if they don't do much of the work.
  • Legitimizing participation
  • Internal leadership can take many forms:
    • managers must work with CoPs from the inside raher then to design or manipulate them form the outside
    • Nurturing CoPs include:
    • The cutting-edge
      • those who shepperd out-of-the-box innitiatives.
    • The boundary leadership
      • those who connect the community to other communities
    • The institutional leadership
      • those who maintain links with other organizational constituencies
    • The interpersonal leadership
      • those who weave the community's social fabric
    • The classificatory leadership
      • those who collect and organize information
    • The day-to-day leadership
      • those who organize activities
    • The inspirational leadership
      • leaders and recognized experts
  • The development of CoPs depend on internal leadership

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