A basic explanation for communities of practice, and some ideas for designing digital environments to help them thrive. Based on portions of presentations I have given over the last 4-5 years.
5. Central
Concern
Because they share a concern
People in a work situation are either there out of passion or necessity, or both, but
regardless of why theyÊŒre doing the work, they almost always want to do it better, and
relate in some social way with their coworkers.
6. âDomainâ
(Central Concern)
âCommunities of Practice 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.â
âPracticeâ âCommunityâ
Etienne Wenger
It turns out that this social pattern has a name -- itâs called a Community of Practice.
Etienne Wenger, who coined the phrase, deïŹnes it like this.
Communities of practice are groups who share a concern or passion or, well, a practice ... and they learn how to do it better by interacting and learning from one another, and doing so on a regular basis.
Lately Iâve been using the phrase âCentral Concernâ instead of âDomainâ because âDomainâ seems to come with some territorial baggage. But âdomainâ in this instance does not imply exclusive ownership; it
implies focus.
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LONG VERSION
>>
DOMAIN: A community of practice is not merely a club of friends or a network of connections between people. It has an identity deïŹned by a shared domain of interest.
Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people. (Wenger)
>>
PRACTICE: Members are practitioners, developing a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems. This takes time and sustained interaction.
A good conversation with a stranger on an airplane may give you all sorts of interesting insights, but it does not in itself make for a community of practice. (Wenger)
>>
COMMUNITY: In pursuing joint interests in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other. A website in itself is not a community of practice. Having the same job or the same
title does not make for a community of practice unless members interact and learn together. (Wenger)
(photo from etienneâs site)
7. Community of Practice
Central
Concern
A community of practice is dynamic ... its members and their involvement shift over time.
>>
Members may come in and out, even its domain can sometimes migrate to a new focus.
>>
Sometimes it attracts outsiders who are loosely involved because they have an interest in the domain.
>>
These people are often part of other practices, and bring skills along with them.
And this is all perfectly OK... in fact, itâs essential. This whole ecosystem of members and ideas is part of what helps these
patterns thrive.
8. All of us are actually part of multiple communities of practice. Some of them
arenât connected at all -- and some of them overlap a good deal (such as at
work). For example, if youâre a technologist, youâre involved in that
community, but if youâre also a manager, thatâs a whole other practice in
itself, and you move in that circle as well.
----
based on p 58 âCommunities of Practice: Learning, Making & Improvingâ -
Wenger
9. Each of us tends
to identify with a
practice.
Communities of Practice are
âhomes for identities ...â
Etienne Wenger
We still tend to gravitate toward a single affiliation.
>> Wenger has a fascinating explanation for how participation in communities of practice shapes our identity ... and that would take hours to get into ... but
suffice it to say that identifying strongly with oneâs practice is a very natural, powerful human pattern. In some ways itâs unavoidable.
Itâs a compulsion that drives all kinds of group identities, from unions to sports teams to nationalism.
----
based on p 58 âCommunities of Practice: Learning, Making & Improvingâ - Wenger
Also Wenger here:
âThey provide homes for identities. They are not as temporary as teams, and unlike business units, they are organized around what matters to their members. Identity is important because, in a sea of information, it helps us sort out what we pay
attention to, what we participate in, and what we stay away from. Having a sense of identity is a crucial aspect of learning in organizations. Consider the annual computer drop at a semiconductor company that designs both analog and digital circuits.
The computer drop became a ritual by which the analog community asserted its identity. Once a year, their hero would climb the highest building on the company's campus and drop a computer, to the great satisfaction of his peers in the analog gang.
The corporate world is full of these displays of identity, which manifest themselves in the jargon people use, the clothes they wear, and the remarks they make. If companies want to beneïŹt from people's creativity, they must support communities as a
way to help them develop their identities.â
http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/lss.shtml
10. Top-Down Emergent
Command Hierarchy Organic Network
Communities
of Practice
Team/Management/Military Crowds/Friends/Incidental Networks
Thereâs a big difference between a community of practice and a managed
hierarchy.
Think of a spectrum between two extremes -- between a top-down command
structure and a purely emergent organic network.
>> A community of practice is primarily emergent, but there is an organizing
principle -- namely, the central concern shared among its practitioners.
11. Closed Open
Expensive Inexpensive
Complex Simple
Accurate Close Enough
A lot like the web ...
and a particular part of the web we call Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is, in essence, the AK 47 of encyclopedias ... itâs more open, itâs less expensive, itâs
much simpler to produce and access, and it gets close enough to accurate that it works just ïŹne.
There is one key difference between them ...
12. Instruction Conversation
Britannica is a one-way medium, using the best technology available at the time it was begun.
It was designed with the assumption that knowledge is to be handed down from authorities, and dispensed like a product from
one container to another.
>>
On the other hand, wikipedia is conversational. It lends itself to linking, discussion, collaboration and argument. It ïŹts the natural
patterns people have for generating and evolving knowledge to begin with.
But it never wouldâve happened without the web.
In this way, wikipedia is just like the web in general ...
itâs a technology that has tapped into a latent need people have to be part of conversations.
13. Instruction Conversation
This isnÊŒt a terribly new distinction ...
as Eric Raymond said in relation to open software, thereÊŒs a similar difference
between a cathedral and a bazaar.
----
cathedral: http://www.tuamparish.com/
bazaar: (CC / some rights reserved) http://ïŹickr.com/photos/adamfranco/228701287/
14. Instruction Conversation
ItÊŒs also key difference between a lecture hall and a pub. Both of them generate plenty of
human knowledge, learning, understanding. But they do it in different ways, with different
assumptions.
TheyÊŒre actually quite complementary ... in fact, at this conference weÊŒve seen this in
practice -- people go to lectures like this one and then have conversations about it in the
halls and over meals and drinks. They work to feed one another.
_____
Lecture Hall: http://www2.uakron.edu/cpspe/dps/facilities.htm
Pub: http://www.mcgoffs.com/
15. There Are Many Communities of Practice
Emergent Groups for Learning, Making & Improving
The name âcommunity of practiceâ is relatively new, but the pattern of social
behavior is as old as civilization itself.
There are and have been multitudes of communities of practice, in all lines of
work.
They are essentially emergent social groups for learning, making and
improving the domain -- the central concern of the practice.
16. Work âTeamâ Community of Practice
Involuntary Voluntary
Product Delivery Learning & Improving
DeïŹned by Mgmt Emerges
One way to understand Communities of Practice is to compare them to something weâre all familiar with, a Work or Project Team. So letâs look at just a few characteristics of both.
>>
Teams are Involuntary -- youâre assigned to them -- but Communities of Practice are very organic, and people get involved in them because of their interest, not to fulïŹll an obligation.
>>
A teamâs purpose is to deliver products, on delivery dates. But a Community of Practiceâs purpose is its own evolution -- Learning, Making & Improving -- the continual improvement of practice and knowledge among its members. Thereâs no
delivery date -- even though the community often may set goals and work together on meeting them, itâs in the service of the ongoing evolution.
>>
And not only are a teamâs members and goals assigned, itâs entirely deïŹned by the organizationâs management structure. Without an org chart, it wouldnât exist.
A Community of Practice is deïŹned by the aggregate of its members, and whatever domain they happen to share in common.
This means that management really doesnât have much of an idea what to *do* with a CoP. It doesnât ïŹt the MBA concept of a managed organization. Even though, in almost any workplace, they exist in some form or another, and in many
organizations theyâre essential to the orgâs success.
[CLICK]
>>
Does this mean Teams and CoPs are mutually exclusive? No... in fact, sometimes the best teams eventually behave like communities of practice, but again -- it happens under the official structure, in the cracks and crevices of it.
They can work in a complementary fashion -- but often they end up blurring boundaries between other teams and branches in the organization.
By the way this is something management often doesnât understand: that when you put something organic down it tends to grow roots. If youâve ever been in a team that you felt like you really grew with, and felt like a community, then were
arbitrarily transferred to some other team ... you feel ripped out by the roots. Thatâs why.
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based in part on http://www.nelh.nhs.uk/knowledge_management/km2/cop_toolkit.asp
17. âPractice is a shared history of learning.â
Etienne Wenger
Practice is conversational.
I especially like Wengerâs statement that the âpractice is a shared history of
learningâ ... itâs a novel, enlightening way to think of practice.
>>That is, practice is inextricably part of the conversation.
18. Xerox
Eureka!
John Seely Brown
Community of
Practice
Domain
John Seely Brown, in his terriïŹc book âThe Social Life of Information,â tells a great story about how, at Xerox, they were trying to ïŹgure out how to improve the technical service and support.
>>They had a traditional top-down structure, and a technical manual was published by central authorities and passed down through the ranks. But this technical manual wasnât doing the job -- they were ïŹnding that their service people
werenât following it, and werenât spending that much time at customersâ locations.
Now, they couldâve brought the hammer down and insisted on certain behaviors, but they didnât. Instead, they did something kind of radical for the 80s, they did an ethnographic study.
And they discovered...
>> that the tech reps were talking to each other more than using the manual -- the knowledge was in the people, and the manual didnât have what they needed.
>> They were behaving like a community of practice!
Rather than forbidding them to converse, they decided to build a system to support their community. They called it Eureka.
>>
Whatâs happening *these days* though, is that the communities of practice arenât waiting for management to create something for them... they now have the tools to create the infrastructure for themselves!
--------
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/01/people.html
http://www.parc.xerox.com/research/projects/commknowledge/eureka.html
19. Group Creation Capabilities
âRidiculously Easy Group
Formingâ
1980 1990 2000 2007
People have gone conversation-happy on the web.
Before the Internet, there were very few ways to create groups: newspapers, local associations, things like that.
>>
But even by 2000, there were only a few main places online, like E-Groups (Now Yahoo Groups) or USENET, and the venerable ListServ mailing lists hosted here
and there, usually in universities.
>>
Suddenly, in the last 5-6 years, weâve seen an incredible explosion -- almost any social software environment has an ability to create a âcommunityâ or âgroupâ. I
think thatâs a big part of what has caused the Web 2.0 phenomenon.
Everywhere you look, you can create a group. Itâs become a sort of commodity: people are coming to just expect to be able to make a group at the click of a
button.
>> Social Scientist Sebastian Paquet calls this âRidiculously Easy Group Formingâ http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/
20. 20
Forrester, in 2006, had an excellent report on âHow Networks Erode Institutional Power, And
What to Do About It.â
Itâs just one of many whitepapers and bits of research explaining this trend. Essentially, as the
ubiquity and operational necessity of free-form communication technologies increases, the less
control traditional institutions have over the peopleâs actions and words.
There is a cultural shift going on, and much of it is due to this infrastructure.
Forrester: Social Computing: How Networks Erode Institutional Power, and What to Do About It
http://forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,38772,00.html
21. âStrategyâ
âInnovationâ
Another quick point about this dichotomy.
Thereâs a lot of obsession lately with the ideas strategy and innovation. We talk about these things like we know what they are, and
can assume they automatically work in tandem.
But ore often than not, strategy comes from the mentality of the traditional hierarchy.
>> Someone at the top of the ladder has a grand vision, and a genius way to make it happen, and devises a strategy. And everyone
else is expected to follow it.
>> Whereas most innovations happen from the ground up -- they emerge from the interactions between peers (or people who, in
those interactions, treat one another as peers).
So my point here is, we throw these terms around almost like theyâre the same thing, but I donât think they are.
For example, what does it mean to have âAn Innovation Strategyâ???
This is why I think an understanding of how people work and learn in Communities of Practice is so important right now -- that
understanding can help make these layers complementary.
22. Traditional Institutions
[Instruction & Production]
?
Organic Networks
[Learning & Innovation]
Network technologies have allowed people to form groups more easily than
ever before, and itâs eroding some of the prominence that traditional
institutions have enjoyed for so long.
>>Weâre left with the question: what approaches or solutions can help these
different approaches to co-exist, and work together?
23. Traditional Institutions
[Instruction & Production]
Organic Networks
[Learning & Innovation]
I suggest that the Community of Practice is one pattern for solving the problem of this
tension -- because it could help reconcile their differences. It doesnât replace either of the
other patterns, but it does help make them more complementary.
It means, however, that the traditional network is going to have to learn to let go of some
of its control, and at least when it comes to learning and community, let the group guide
the domain.
24. Self-Interest over Altruism
Remixability & Presence
Shared Artifacts
Motivation
Cultivation = Moderation
Love What Youâre Doing
Get Your Hands Dirty
Donât Try to Fake It
Body Language / Subtle Cues
Tweak-able Architecture
Rich Identity & Connection
There are tons of great writings out there about the best practices for designing for participation and groups.
But we donât have a week to go into that -- so Iâve boiled it down to a nice formula.
Basically, cultivating means ïŹnding the balance between encouraging activity (motivation) and shaping that activity toward healthy ends with moderation (âdividingâ it, in a sense).
You have to love what youâre doing -- or you wonât be able to care enough to be involved.
You have to be willing to get your hands dirty by getting into the mix with everyone else.
And you canât fake it -- you canât assign someone who isnât invested to be a cultivator.
This is why, actually, it makes the most sense for a community of practiceâs members to be the cultivators... even if thereâs a pecking order of some kind (which is ïŹne! hierarchies are helpful at times in the service of the practice & domain -- but they tend to be much more ïŹuid and meritocracy-based in CoPs)
MOTIVATION
Self-Interest: Itâd be nice if we could assume people will do things âfor the good of the community.â But give it up. People donât actually function that way on a continual basis.
Besides, a community of practice is ïŹrst and foremost PRACTICAL (hence the word âpracticeâ right there in the name!).
People want to learn skills, get better at them, and get social cred for their chops and contributions. Itâs this collective effort of enlightened self-interest that causes the community to emerge.
So, think about how to best increase chances that people will get that feedback and practice improvement they so desire.
Remixability: no community is an island. People have multivariate lives, and theyâre increasingly expecting to be able to grab bits of one thing and have it mix into other things. If your community infrastructure doesnât lend itself to syndication, mobile interaction, and the like -- itâs risking irrelevance. People want it to come to them.
Presence: Essentially like remixability, but with emphasis on personal âtherenessâ -- people often want to be able to contribute to an ongoing conversation throughout the day, and be âin itâ whenever itâs convenient to them. (Of course they want to be able to hide from it when they want too ... and thatâs ok.)
Shared Artifacts: one study showed that having shared artifacts was important to CoPs in general, but especially important for virtual. Having something that everyone can work on together is very important -- which is one reason why wiki-like functions are exploding for collaboration online.
MODERATION
Most social software weÊŒre familiar with is on the listserv/usenet model: threaded mail/post discussions.
But there are limits to that model. For one thing, it arose in a very homogeneous community of engineers, academics, etc, who all knew one another professionally in one way or another, and who had a sort of cultural baseline they were communicating from. Any further etiquette emerged over time in the online culture (this is all pre-1994 or so). Anyone who was getting on the Internet in late 80s up to about 93 remembers the tons of stuff the community had you read before you felt like you should even post! (One origin of FAQs)
Then the ïŹoodgates opened, and frankly broke the old model. But weÊŒve mostly been stuck with threaded discussions or real-time IRC-like chat for 15 years.
Gradually the more forward-thinking sites started having more nuanced feedback mechanisms, so the community can police itself to a larger extent. This is just like in real-time conversation, where body language can mean so much. You donÊŒt want to have to use the baseball bat, when a rolled eye or a crossed brow will do the trick. Software is getting to where it can do some of that body-language work for us.
Also, the architecture needs to be tweakable -- again by arch, I donÊŒt mean the labeling and taxonomy alone but how they service the structure and channeling of human activity on the site, as well as user permissions, what is surfaced and not surfaced by the system (do users see who made negative comments too or just the positive ones? is karma score made available for everyone to see or is it a private score for the userÊŒs eyes only?
If someone adds a friend do you let everyone see they were added or is it just between the users? what algorithm is in use for determining karma?) All these things need to be able to be adjusted as you get to know how your particular community works in it over time -- because theyÊŒre all different culturally and personality-wise, as well as the kind of work they do.
Also, Rich Identity/Connection is important: the more invested someone is in their identity within the community, the less likely they will be to act like a jerk and lose credibility. Their Ê»avatarÊŒ (usually just a proïŹle page!) needs to allow for enough rich connection and identity expression that they can invest deeply... and feel a connection to the avatar that they donÊŒt want to disrupt.
These are all really important questions (which, frankly, I see as architectural questions) that make or break the community space.
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Communities of Practice: Going Virtual http://www.getcited.org/pub/103396967
Some research for this section came from these sources:
Communities of Practice: Going Virtual http://www.getcited.org/pub/103396967
Where is the Action in Virtual CoPs? http://www-staff.it.uts.edu.au/~lueg/papers/commdcscw00.pdf
Moderation Strategies Wiki http://social.itp.nyu.edu/shirky/wiki/
Shirky on moderation: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/03/etech_clay_shirky_1.html
Tim OÊŒReillyÊŒs âArchitectures of Participationâ post 2004 http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/articles/architecture_of_participation.html
Andrew McAfeeÊŒs Enterprise 2.0 work: http://blog.hbs.edu/faculty/amcafee/index.php/faculty_amcafee_v3/enterprise_20_version_20/
Joi Ito on collaborating through WoW: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5160442894955175707
Evolving communities of practice (IBM study): http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/404/gongla.pdf)
Tons more here: http://www.inkblurt.com/archives/446