Community Of Practice
A CommunityOfPractice is a group of people who are in some sense defined by their task. Here's one definition [1]:
- Community of Practice: A group of practitioners involved in a common activity, albeit performing different roles. Essential characteristics of communities of practice are: 1) they are not defined by organizational mandate (e.g., the "org chart"), but rather by the ways people actually work together, 2) they involve many different "roles", as opposed to a flat structure, and 3) they experience a ongoing flux of community members, who enter the community from the periphery and gain status as knowledgeable members through participation in the community of practice.
Here's another [2], from a page devoted to the topic.
- A Community of Practice (COP) is a special type of informal network that emerges from a desire to work more effectively or to understand work more deeply among members of a particular specialty or work group. At the simplest level, CoPs are small groups of people who've worked together over a period of time and through extensive communication have developed a common sense of purpose and a desire to share work-related knowledge and experience.
Here's a final one, from a book on LegitimatePeripheralParticipation:
- A community of practice is a set of relations among persons, activity, and world, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping communities of practice. A community of practice is an intrinsic condition for the existence of knowledge...
In my so-far cursory reading, some additional features stick out:
- Personal identity is bound up with the task that defines the community. For example, someone might refer to himself as a "hacker" (in either the old sense of compulsive programmer or in the new sense of security cracker) or a "Smalltalk programmer". Despite the emphasis on the verb (what one does), this statement also implies a great deal about what one is.
- Learning is done by telling stories to each other and by performing ever-more-central tasks. This is called LegitimatePeripheralParticipation.
- "Learning, from this point of view, is not simply a matter of acquiring information; it requires developing the disposition, demeanor, and outlook of the practitioners." -- John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. That's why saying "I'm a hacker" is a statement that usually says much more than "I program a lot".
- Reputation plays a central role. In the crudest terms, there are "masters" and "apprentices". A person's life within the community tends to be "centripetal" - it is important to move closer to mastery of the task.
Some references:
Communities Of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, by Etienne Wenger.
[ISBN 0521663636]
Organizational Learning and Communities of Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning, and Innovation, by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid,
Organization Science (Vol.2, No. 1, pp. 40-57), February 1991,
Is a fairly famous article describing how Xerox copier repair people learn: much more by telling war stories in the break room than from the repair manuals and training courses.
The Social Life of Information, by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
[ISBN 0875847625] is new in 02000.
-- BrianMarick