ICT in Education

Thoughts on: Communities of practice: the organisational frontier (Wenger & Snyder, 2000)

September 16, 2007

Wenger, E. C. and W. M.Snyder (2000). Communities of practice: The  organizational frontier. Harvard Business Review 78(1): 139.

An interesting overview of some useful guidelines for setting up and running a successful community of practice. This is heavily business oriented and the communities seem to all be based within one organisation but some of the ideas are still useful – particularly as these are things that can be hard to sell to the finance types who need to pin measurable achievements to money spent.

“What are communities of practice? In brief, they’re groups of people informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise”

“People in communities of practice share their experiences and knowledge in free-flowing, creative ways that foster new approaches to problems”

“Communities of practice… are informal – they organise themselves, meaning they set their own agendas and establish their own leadership. And membership in a community of practice is self-selected”

There’s a lot of stuff in here about the need for strong organisational support in nurturing a community of practice in a business – ideally there will be a senior executive who is able to step in and provide support when the community identifies problems (such as I.T infrastructure that holds things up) . They also make the point that managers need to use non-traditional means to assess the value of the community of practice – anecdotal evidence from participants about how problems were solved etc.  (Good forum for sharing “best practice”). (Apparently they can also help with staff retention)

In essence, this might be a useful paper with a lot of case-study type examples if you were wanting to create a c.o.p in your large enterprise – but there’s virtually nothing about communities that stretch  across fields.

Entry Filed under: 915, democratic, discussion, network based learning. .