Examples of communities of practice

The communities Lave and Wenger studied were naturally forming as practitioners of craft and skill-based activities met to share experiences and insights (Lave & Wenger 1991). Lave and Wenger observed situated learning within a community of practice among Yucatán midwives, native tailors, navy quartermasters and meat cutters (Lave & Wenger 1991) as well as insurance claims processors. (Wenger 1998). Other fields have made use of the concept of CoPs. Examples include education (Grossman 2001), sociolinguistics, material anthropology, and second language acquisition (Kimble, Hildreth & Bourdon 2008).

A famous example of a community of practice within an organization is that which developed around the Xerox customer service representatives who repaired the machines in the field (Brown & Duguid 2000). The Xerox reps began exchanging tips and tricks over informal meetings over breakfast or lunch and eventually Xerox saw the value of these interactions and created the Eureka project to allow these interactions to be shared across the global network of representatives. The Eureka database has been estimated to have saved the corporation 100$ million.

Communities of practice compared to functional or project teams

• A project team differs from a community of practice in several significant ways (McDermott, 1999).
• A project team is driven by deliverables with shared goals, milestones and results.
• A project team meets to share and exchange information and experiences just as the community of practice does, but team membership is defined by task.
• A project team typically has designated members who remain consistent in their roles during the project.
• A project team is dissolved once its mission is accomplished.

By contrast,

• A community of practice is often organically created, with as many objectives as members of that community.
• Community membership is defined by the knowledge of the members. CoP membership changes and members may take on new roles within the community as interests and needs arise.
• A community of practice can exist as long as the members believe they have something to contribute to it, or gain from it.

Communities of Practice versus Communities of Interest

In addition to the distinction between CoP and other types of organizational groupings found in the workplace, in some cases it is useful to differentiate CoP from Communities of Interest (CoI).

Community of Interest

• A group of people interested in sharing information and discussing a particular topic that interests them.
• Members are not necessarily experts or practitioners of the topic around which the CoI has formed.
• The purpose of the CoI is to provide a place where people who share a common interest can go and exchange information, ask questions, and express their opinions about the topic.
• Membership in a CoI is not dependent upon expertise - one only needs to be interested in the subject.

Community of Practice

• A CoP, in contrast, is a group of people who are active practitioners.
• CoP participation is not appropriate for non-practitioners.
• The purpose of a CoP, as discussed above, is to provide a way for practitioners to share tips and best practices, ask questions of their colleagues, and provide support for each other.
• Membership is dependent on expertise - one should have at least some recent experience performing in the role or subject area of the CoP.
• Example: Someone who is interested in photography and has some background/training in it finds an online CoP for working photojournalists, who use it to discuss various aspects of their work. Since this community is focused on working photojournalists, it would not be appropriate for an amateur photographer to contribute to the CoP discussions there. Depending on the CoPs structure non-CoP members may have access to reading the discussions and accessing other materials of the community.

Communities of practice and knowledge management

Wasko and Faraj (2000) describe three kinds of knowledge: "knowledge as object", "knowledge embedded within individuals", and "knowledge embedded in a community". Communities of Practice have become associated with finding, sharing, transferring, and archiving knowledge, as well as making explicit "expertise", or tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is considered to be those valuable context-based experiences that can not easily be captured, codified and stored (Davenport & Prusak 2000), also (Hildreth & Kimble 2002).

Because knowledge management is seen "primarily as a problem of capturing, organizing, and retrieving information, evoking notions of databases, documents, query languages, and data mining" (Thomas, Kellogg & Erickson 2001), the community of practice, collectively and individually, is considered a rich potential source of helpful information in the form of actual experiences; in other words, best practices.

Thus, for knowledge management, a community of practice is one source of content and context that if codified, documented and archived can be accessed for later use.