Online Communities of Practice

Capture and reuse knowledge.

Informal learning is 80% of all learning. Learners are doing it for themselves.  Open source tools for collaboration abound. So what? So, take your communities of practice online.

What’s the big idea?

The idea of communities of practice is not new. Human beings have always come together to solve problems and to share knowledge and information. Most notably in the research community, Etienne Wenger has led enquiry and promotion of the concept of communities of practice, having coined the term together with anthropologist Jean Lave.

Communities of practice have three things in common:

  • A domain of common interest
  • Genuine community
  • Real practitioners

Without these three things, you may have affiliation or interests in common but not a community of practice. Typically, communities of practice engage a different activities such as: problem solving, requests for information, seeking experience, reusing assets, coordination and synergy, discussing developments, documenting projects, visits or mapping knowledge and identifying gaps. See http://www.ewenger.com/theory/index.htm  for more on this.

For example, Wikipedia is an example of community of practice with common interest (mapping all knowledge and identifying gaps), genuine community (thousands of volunteers actively collaborating) and real practitioners (everyone). More on the power of wikis for communities here.

What’s in it for learning and collaboration?

With up to 80% of learning in organisations going on informally, communities of practice probably already account for a large part of learning in any organisation. People connect to solve problems, learn and develop skills. But the risk is that knowledge and learning is lost when people move on as it is never captured, or poor practice is replicated. Check out our report on informal learning for more on this.

Take the community of practice online and you instantly have a way of capturing, categorising and searching for knowledge and information.

The online learning community offers some real benefits:

  • Connect people who are spread over wide geographic areas to deal with common practice
  • Capture and distribute new practice instantly by using simple tools such as Wikis, discussion forums or chat rooms
  • Make collaboration and problem solving easy through online communication tools such as collaborations spaces with document sharing tools

Using tools such as Mambo http://www.mamboserver.com/ and SeedWiki www.seedwiki.com/ you can put up a community site in days and allow communities to form and shape either organically or by putting simple categories and structures in place.

Ways of using an online learning community:

  • Induction – create a community for new starters to ask questions and contribute about working for your organisation
  • Sales – create a community which captures and discusses best practice for selling products or services
  • Technical – create a problem solving community which shares information on how to deal with technical challenges
  • Leadership – create a community which shares best practice and ideas on effective leadership in your organisation

Those of us who "own" training would do well to ask ourselves what are we doing to drive communities towards their tipping point in our organisations? How will we launch and sustain them? What tools should we use? Figure these things out and we're on our way.