Communities of Practice

Knowledge Management Article Series

Communities of Practice - The Concept

‘Communities of practice’ is an important concept that developed in knowledge management literature. Communities of practice are informal groups of people who share some work related activity in common. ‘The communities of practice’ concept is closely associated with the practice based perspective on knowledge.



What are communities of practice? In brief, they're groups of people informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise — engineers engaged in deep-water drilling, for example, consultants who specialize in strategic marketing or equity research analysts.

Process

Some communities of practice meet regularly — for lunch on Fridays for instance. Some are connected primarily by e-mail networks. People in communities of practice share their experiences and knowledge in free-flowing, creative ways that foster new approaches to problems.



Yahoo groups, Google groups etc. are facilitating many communities of practice.






Web References



http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/1317.html
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/2855.html

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