Communities of practice (CoP’s) are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. Wenger, 2014

Because of this common concern or passion, all members of the particular community want to ensure that the outcome is something they can all feel proud of. This lifts the performance of all members in the community.

CoP’s are a good example of the idea that ‘collaborative work produces collaborative intelligence’. Community members share their ideas, experiences and knowledge with the rest of the community. This kind of collaborative work often produces higher standards and depths of knowledge from the process of the different perspectives and the different experiences coming together.

Wenger argues that there are three crucial characteristics of a community of practice:

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• domain: a common interest that connects and holds together the community
• community: a community is bound by the shared activities they pursue (for example, meetings, discussions) around their common domain
• practice: members of a community of practice are practitioners; what they do informs their participation in the community; and what they learn from the community affects what they do. http://wenger-trayner.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/06-Brief-introduction-to-communities-of-practice.pdf

The third crucial aspect of a CoP,  the aspect of practice, is based on affirmative reciprocity: members like in order to be likes and they follow in order to be followed.

Brown and Duguid (2000) describe a community of practice developed around the Xerox customer service representatives who repaired the machines in the field. The Xerox reps began exchanging tips and tricks over informal meetings at breakfast or lunch and eventually Xerox saw the value of these interactions and created the Eureka project to allow these interactions to be shared across the global network of representatives. The Eureka database has been estimated to have saved the corporation $100 million. Companies such as Google and Apple are encouraging communities of practice through the sharing of knowledge across their many specialist staff. http://Brown, J. and Duguid, Paul (2000). “Balancing act: How to capture knowledge without killing it”. Harvard Business Review.

_{Bank of America’s Vital Voices progam links women executives of small and medium sized enterprises from around the world
Image: © Belfast Telegraph, 2014}

Benefits of CoP’s

• Social capital: through informal connections that participants build in their community of practice, and in the process of sharing their expertise, learning from others, and participating in the group, members are said to be acquiring social capital, especially those members who demonstrate expertise and experience.
• Knowledge management: Communities of Practice have become associated with finding, sharing, transferring, and archiving knowledge, as well as making explicit "expertise", or tacit knowledge.

Although communities of practice are likely to become more rather than less important in a digital age, it is probably a mistake to think of them as a replacement for traditional forms of education. There is no single, ‘right’ approach to the design of teaching. Different groups have different needs. Communities of practice are more of an alternative for certain kinds of learners, such as lifelong learners, and are likely to work best when participants already have some domain knowledge and can contribute personally and in a constructive manner – which suggests the need for at least some form of prior general education or training for those participating in effective communities of practice. http://www.tonybates.ca/2014/10/01/the-role-of-communities-of-practice-in-a-digital-age/