RESOURCES

“The increased focus on interdisciplinarity and collaboration in academia necessitates a re-evaluation of established mentoring practices. This article reviews the literature on traditional and peer mentoring models, explores Communities of Practice (CoP) within learning organizations, and discusses the implementation and evaluation of a CoP at the University of Idaho ...”. Read more.

“What is most interesting about the interplay of community and technology is our ability to learn together. In particular, when we talk about how technology enables community, we are particularly focused on communities of practice, communities where the learning component is central.”. Read more.

“In community building, we choose the people and the conversation that will produce the accountability to build relatedness, structure belonging, and move the action forward ... two additional strands in the fabric of community explored here are the need for each small step to capture a quality of aliveness and the need for it to evolve in an organic way.” Read more.

Communities of practice, according to the authors, have three essential focal points: topic area or subject; the people; and the specific set of frameworks, tools, information, language, stories and documents that the community shares and produces with one another. Read more.

"Communities of practice are considered to be important elements in the strategy concerning knowledge exchange and innovation of many organisations. Delft University of Technology is studying communities of practice in different (networked-) organisations ..." Download PDF

Share knowledge, information and solutions in the Government of Canada's Communities of Practice Portal. Website

With the current trends towards downsizing, outsourcing and globalisation, modern organisations are reducing the numbers of people they employ. When people leave organisational knowledge is also lost. Organisations now have to cope with the increasing internationalisation of business forcing collaboration and knowledge sharing across time and distance simultaneously. In this paper we explore how knowledge is created shared and sustained using Lave and Wenger’s (1991) theory of Communities of Practice (CoPs). We investigate how CoPs might translate to a geographically distributed international environment through a case study that explores the functioning of a CoP across national boundaries. Website

Clay Shirky just gave a fantastic talk at ETech about the patterns behind moderation systems which went beyond that. Best talk so far for me. Added 10 Mar 2006: just to clarify--I was typing as Clay spoke, so these notes are a mixture of his words and my paraphrases. So before taking umbrage or lauding Clay as a grand master of the English tongue, you should check with Clay to ensure he actually said what I've written. Website

I've come to use the term "the architecture of participation" to describe the nature of systems that are designed for user contribution. Larry Lessig's book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, which he characterizes as an extended meditation on Mitch Kapor's maxim, "architecture is politics", made the case that we need to pay attention to the architecture of systems if we want to understand their effects. Website

"I’m not satisfied with my earlier definition of Enterprise 2.0, so let’s propose a refinement. Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers. Social software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities." Website

IBM Global Services began implementing a business model that included support for the growth and development of communities of practice focused on the competencies of the organization. This paper describes our experience working with these communities over a five-year period, concentrating specifically on how the communities evolved." Website