Communities of Practice, Learning as a Social Systemby Etienne Wenger
Developing and nurturing CoPs
Nurturing CoPs include:
Negotiating their strategic context
Legitimizing participation
Leardership must have intrinsic legitimacyin the community.
managers must work with CoPs from the inside raher then to design or manipulate them form the outside
Internal leadership can take many forms:
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
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.
The development of CoPs depend on internal leadership
Importance of Communities to Organizations
CoPs structure an organization's learning in two ways
through interactions at their boundaries
through the knowledge thy develop at their core
They provide homes for identities
They can retain knowledge in "living ways"
They are nodes for the exchange and interpretation of information.
CoPs become crucial to those that recognize knowledge as a key asset.
Defining Communities of Practice
No community can fully design the learningof another; but conversely no community can fully design its own learning.
They self-organize but they flourish when their learning fits with their organizational environment.
CoPs do not require heavy institutional infrastructures but their members need time and space to collaborate.
CoPs do not require much managementbut they can use leadership.
A CoP exists because it produces a shared practice as membersengage in a collective process of learning.
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 sensethat it is "about" something, not just a set of relationships.
CoPs develop around things that matter to people
CoPs are fundamentally self-organized systems
CoPs move throug different stages of development
A CoP defines itself along 3 dimensions:
What capability it has produced
How it functions
What it is about
A community of practice implies shared practice
