copfaq

=**Communities of practice**=

** A few frequently asked questions **
with brief answers by Etienne Wenger

**What is a community of practice?**
A community of practice is a group of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do, and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.

This definition reflects the fundamentally social nature of human learning. It is very broad. It applies to a street gang, whose members learn how to survive in a hostile world, as well as a group of engineers who learn how to design better devices or a group of civil servants who seek to improve service to citizens.

In all cases, the key elements are
 * The **domain**: members are brought together by a learning need they share (whether this shared learning need is explicit or not and whether learning is the motivation for their coming together or a by-product of it)
 * The **community**: their collective learning becomes a bond among them over time (experienced in various ways and thus not a source of homogeneity)
 * The **practice**: their interactions produce resources that affect their practice (whether they engage in actual practice together or separately)

**How are communities of practice different from more familiar structures like teams or task forces?**
A team is held together by a task. When the task is accomplished the team disperses. Team members are likely to learn something in the performance of that task, but this learning does not define the team. It is the task that keeps them together. And it is their respective commitment and contributions to the task that is the main source of trust and cohesion among them.

A task force is a special type of team pulled together to address a specific problem, usually of broad scope. Often people are selected in order to represent an organization or a perspective in the negotiation of a solution. It is their commitment to the process that keeps them going and respect for the voices they represent that builds trust.

A community of practice is held together by the “learning value” members find in their interactions. They may perform tasks together, but these tasks do not define the community. It is the ongoing learning that sustains their mutual commitment. Members may come from different organizations or perspectives, but it is their engagement as individual learners that is the most salient aspect of their participation. The trust members develop is based on their ability to learn together: to care about the domain, to respect each other as practitioners, to expose their questions and challenges, and to provide responses that reflect practical experience.

**How is a community of practice different from an informal network?**
All communities of practice are networks in the sense that they involve connections among members. But not all networks are communities of practice: a community of practice entails shared domain that becomes a source of identification. This identity creates a sense of commitment to the community as a whole, not just connections to a few linking nodes.

**Why should organizations pay attention to communities of practice?**
Communities of practice are the perfect vehicle for involving practitioners directly in the management of the knowledge they need individually and collectively to do their work. As a result they engage in the development of strategic capabilities critical for achieving the goals of the organization(s) they belong to. For instance, consulting firms cultivate communities of practice so that when clients interact with a consultant they actually have access to the knowledge and intelligence of the whole firm, not just one person. Schools cultivate communities of practice so that teachers move from being lonely practitioners to offering their students the pedagogical creativity of the whole community. Governments encourage communities of practice to learn and find synergies across agencies. Non-governmental organizations are finding that communities of practice provide new ways to foster international development by connecting practitioners from various countries to exchange and explore ideas among peers.

Communities of practice have always existed in organizations, but they have lived “underground” so to speak. The formal and informal parts of organizations have lived parallel but separate lives. In a knowledge economy, this benign neglect is no longer possible. Creating and leveraging knowledge is not amenable to industrial command-and-control hierarchies. It is now essential to legitimize, engage, and integrate into the organization the communities that sustain the capabilities necessary to its success.

**Why should practitioners be involved in developing strategic capabilities?**
Traditionally, knowledge has been viewed as something that experts hand down to practitioners. But organizations in all sectors are discovering that something unique happens when practitioners become direct learning partners by forming a community: they bring insights from their engagement with customers and practical challenges; the knowledge they share and create together builds on these insights and challenges; and they can apply this knowledge to their work because it reflects their experience.

Admittedly, the experience of practitioners cannot be the source of everything they need to know. So there is definitely a role for specialized experts and researchers. But the contributions of these experts and researchers are more meaningful and useful when they are integrated into an ongoing learning process that is driven by practitioners themselves.

In order to reflect the experience of practitioners, a community of practice needs to be self-governing in a fundamental sense. This way, practice can really become the curriculum—in the sense of providing both learning challenges and learning resources likely to be relevant.

**What are the first three things one should consider doing to get a community of practice started?**
You cannot start a community by yourself. In fact you cannot start a community at all, to be quite honest about it. The only people who can form a community are the members themselves as a collectivity. But this does not mean that you cannot do anything if you see the need for a community that does not exist yet.

The first step is to have a series of conversations with potential members. What issues and challenges are they facing? Do they interact with others facing similar issues and challenges? Do they think it would help to make such interactions more sustained and systematic?

The second step, which often happens in the context of the first one, is to find some potential members who are willing to join you in your vision of a community of practice and to invest their own identities as practitioners in making this happen.

The third step, assuming the first two have yielded positive results, is to engage a dedicated core group from the second step in designing a process by which the community can get going. Often this will entail organizing a launch event. But in some cases, it could just entail starting working on an issue and letting the process attract others. The level of visibility of the launch process will depend on the degree to which it can build on existing identities associated with the domain of the community.

**How long should a community take to get going?**
Community formation takes time, but the time it takes for a community to become fully operational varies a lot from case to case. Some communities are so ready to exist that they congeal as soon as members have an opportunity to start learning together. Members can see the value of connecting with each other even before they start. Other communities begin much more tentatively. Members have to experience the value of learning together over and over before they are ready to make a commitment. But in general, one could expect a community to really get going and produce value within months and become mature in less than a year.

**How long should a community be expected to last?**
There really is no set length of time that a community should last. In most cases, a community of practice starts without a clear sense of how long it will exist. It will last as long as members find value in their learning together. The intensity and relevance of this value are more important than the duration of the group. Some communities exist for a very short time and some last for years. Of course just one encounter will not make for a community: some level of sustained interaction is required over time. But a community should be allowed to disperse as soon as it has lived its usefulness.

**What level of participation should one expect?**
Participation in communities of practice is rarely a person’s main activity or job, so expected levels of participation should reflect this reality. Mainly they should reflect the level of relevance of the domain to the main activities of members. This means that levels of participation will likely be quite different for different people. It is not unusual to have a smaller core group of members who identify very strongly with the community and contribute most of the activity—with concentric bands of participation from very active members to merely passive observers (or so-called lurkers on the web). This disparity is usually not a problem as long as it reflects personal interest in the domain and not some other distinction, such as headquarter versus field or language fluency. In a healthy community there is usually a flow of people moving across these levels of participation.

**How big can a community of practice become?**
Being a community of practice does not depend on size. It depends on identification with the domain and enough mutual engagement to produce learning value.

Of course, if a community is very small, members will likely have heard each other’s stories and opinions after a while. Without new blood or more people, interactions often become stale, unless the domain is extremely dynamic and presents new, exciting challenges all the time.

If a community becomes very large, intense interactions will be more difficult. The community will tend to spawn smaller subgroups based on specialized interest or geographical proximity. But if one considers different levels of participation, as long as an active core group sustains enough engagement, there is no limit to the number of people who might benefit from the learning that takes place (especially with new technologies that enable peripheral participation across time and space).

**Can a community of practice exist only online?**
A community of practice is not defined by the medium through which members connect. Mutually relevant challenges of practice are much more important than modes of interaction. The key to a community of practice is the ability of participants to recognize the practitioner in each other and that basis, to act as learning partners. If online interactions alone allow people to do this in meaningful ways (and by now there is enough evidence that it is possible), then the result is an “online” community of practice.

**Should participation be voluntary or compulsory?**
In general, it is much better to let participation be voluntary. This way, communities of practice live on because they create value for members, not because of an edict or a box to check. It does not mean that one cannot strongly encourage participation or even request that someone run an idea by the relevant community. But making participation compulsory more generally runs the risk that communities become just another meeting to go to and survive. This is likely to deflate the very social energy that makes healthy communities of practice places of meaningful learning.

**What are three key success factors for communities of practice?**
Communities of practice are complex social structures, whose voluntary and self-governing nature makes them quite sensitive to subtle dynamics. As a result a host of factors potentially contribute to their success (and to their failure). Any of them can become critical in some circumstances, but if I am asked to name my top three, I generally mention the following:
 * **Identification**: Communities of practice thrive on social energy, which both derives from and creates identification. Passion for the domain is key. This makes the negotiation of the domain a critical success factor.
 * **Leadership**: A key success factor is the dedication and skill of people who take the initiative to nurture the community. Many communities fail, not because members have lost interest, but simply because nobody has the energy and time to take care of logistics and hold the space for the inquiry.
 * **Time**: Time is a challenge for most communities, whose members have to handle competing priorities. Theoretically, time should not be an issue if the interest is there, but practically it remains a constant challenge. Because time is at such a premium, a key principle of community cultivation is to ensure “high value for time” for all those who invest themselves.

Other candidates for success factors include: self-governance, a sense of ownership, the level of trust, recognition for contributions, high expectations for value creation, organizational voice, connection to a broader field, interactions with other communities.

**Should communities of practice attempt to assess or measure the value they create?**
The issue of measurement and assessment is a controversial one when it comes to communities. Some see measurements as community killers and some see them as the only way communities can survive in organizations. The reality of most communities is more nuanced. While it is true that red tape can harm a community, some awareness of the value created can also inspire members. And while demonstrating value to an organization is important to ensure support, trying to measure everything is not always the best way to make the value of a community understandable. This calls for a very pragmatic attitude.

Communities of practice can produce some very tangible outcomes, such as time savings or documents, whose value can be measured. And a good part of the value of having a community is less tangible and difficult to assess, such as the level of mutual trust, commitment, and inspiration. Often the existence of a community can be readily justified by accounting for the tangible outcomes and assuming that less tangible aspects come as a bonus.

Practically, since time is often the most difficult challenge for communities, one needs to consider carefully how much of their precious time available for community participation members should devote to justifying the existence of their community. Much of this depends on the context and on the level of direct investment in communities.

One principle to remember when thinking about measurements applied to communities and learning in organizations is that the true management of knowledge processes requires intelligent conversations. If measurements are in support of intelligent conversations about real value creation, they tend to be useful. But if they are a substitute for such conversations, they tend to become counterproductive.

**What should an organization put in place to cultivate communities of practice systematically?**
Organizations are only beginning to learn how to integrate communities of practice. The point is not to institutionalize them and shape them into the image of the formal organization, but to create “hooks” into formal systems for recognizing, engaging, and supporting them. One big lesson is that bureaucratic processes do not work well for this purpose. Leading organizations are learning that intelligence cannot be designed out of the process. Therefore the key principle is to use formal structures to create spaces, processes, and opportunities for intelligent conversations. Examples include:
 * Leveraging hierarchical positions to discuss the strategic importance of learning and the role of communities of practice in enabling it
 * Formalizing roles and relationships like community leadership and executive sponsorship to create opportunities to explore the strategic value of communities, their contributions, their perspectives, and their need for resources
 * Tuning formal processes like performance appraisal so that individual contributions can be discussed and recognized meaningfully
 * Establishing a dedicated support function to address the logistical, educational, and infrastructural needs of communities and help orchestrate the whole learning system and required strategic conversations.

Successfully enabling this hybrid and paradoxical combination of vertical and horizontal structures is going to be one of the main challenges of the organization of the twenty-first century.

**Are the new “web 2.0” technologies relevant?**
Technology has always been relevant to communities to help members connect across time and space and share relevant resources. Web 2.0 technologies are often associated with new, more “horizontal” ways to connect and share information, networked thinking, and new forms of representation—all uses of technology that are very much aligned with the peer-to-peer learning typical of communities of practice. There are many different tools and for each tool, many different realizations; and there is also a great variety in the ways people and communities use these tools. Yet practically, it is useful to review briefly the potential that these new technologies hold for the learning of communities of practice.


 * Wikis** (e.g., //MediaWiki// used by Wikipedia). Communities of practice use wikis to create and publish collective, co-authored documents, including web pages. They also use wikis as interactive workspaces for conducting projects or for planning events. The use of wikis range from mere accumulations of resources to full co-authoring of text.
 * __Accumulation__. For communities, the easiest way to use a wiki is as a repository to which everyone can contribute in order to accumulate text, images, and other resources--forinstance bibliographies, lists of pointers of interest, descriptions of tools, etc. In such cases, the advantage of wikis is that it is very easy for members to add to the repository at any time.
 * __Co-authoring__. Wikis also afford the ability to edit the same text collectively, so that over time, a jointly edited wiki can come to represent the mind of the community. Examples include wiki documents that represent the community’s knowledge (documentation of a practice, key principles, lessons learned from projects) or wiki documents that define the community itself (community agreements, evolving learning agenda, public statements or descriptions). In practice, this tight co-authoring of a communal text is more difficult than accumulation because it requires enough trust that people can start editing each other’s writing with confidence they are not overstepping their bounds. It often requires coordination and conventions for negotiating edits.


 * Blogs** (e.g., //Blogger//, Google’s blogging tool). Communities use blogs in two ways: individual blogs and collective blogs.
 * __Individual blogs__ give people a personal voice as contributors to a community. Some communities offer individual blogs inside the community space for specific purposes, such as telling personal stories of practice. Some communities also point to the personal blogs of their members outside the community space, for instance by including member’s blogs on their “blog roll” (links to associated sites), or by offering a feed that aggregates members’ blogs. Informal communities also develop as conversations connect related blogs through postings and comments that point to each other across blogs.
 * __Collective blogs__ are also used by communities as shared chronological spaces for posting opinions or news items. In some cases, a community blog acts as a kind of dynamic, online newsletter to keep members or broader audiences up-to-date on what is happening in and around the community. In other cases, a collective blog focuses on a topic and the chronological stream of postings and comments forms a kind of conversation on that topic.


 * Tagging** (e.g., //Delicious//, a social bookmarking site based on tagging). Communities can use a set of tags as communal keywords, thus creating shared set of pointers to resources relevant to members. A “tag cloud” (the set of tags that a community uses sized according to frequency of use) can be a way to represent dynamically what a community is interested in and where its learning is focusing. It can be interesting for members to visualize their membership by comparing their own tag cloud that of their community.


 * Micro-blogging** (e.g., //Twitter//). Micro-blogging allows members of a community to be in very close contact on an ongoing basis as they subscribe to each other’s “tweet” feeds. It is way to follow what members are up to. Community members can also use these “tweet” messages to get just-in-time help, instant responses to a request for information, or quick feedback on a thought or new idea.


 * Networking websites** (e.g., //Facebook//). These sites offer quick, simple, and cheap ways for communities to open spaces for interaction. While the sites may not offer all the features that communities of practice need, they present the advantage of being located where people already have accounts, profiles, and personal networks.


 * Media-sharing sites** (e.g., //Flickr//, for sharing photos). Some communities open accounts on these sites (or use community-specific tags on them) so that members can share photos, videos, and maps. This provides a simple way to document community events or to collect resources relevant to members.


 * Avatar-based web worlds** (e.g., //Second Life//). Some communities have meeting areas on avatar-based sites. It allows them to have more of a sense of shared space even when they cannot be together in physical space. For instance, the ability to see who is there, even as an avatar, can help members get a more concrete sense of community togetherness than in a teleconference call. The full potential of these types of sites has yet to be fully explored.

The use of these technologies brings up all sorts of delicate community issues. Who has the right to read, edit, or administer a wiki? Who is an author on a blog? How do members keep track of where relevant events are happening and relevant things are stored? Will a collective resource become incomprehensible without some level of coordination? How do members manage the mix of private and public spaces? The new tools emphasize user control and self-organization, but their effective use by communities often entails more coordinating work and development of shared practices than one would expect.