Communities of Practice Definitions
by Richard McDermott*
SHORT VERSION
A community of practice is a group of people who share information, ideas,
insights and advice about a topic or domain. In the course of doing so they
develop a common practice (a shared body of knowledge, process, rituals,
approaches, thinking. Over time they build a common history and develop a
shared identity.
LONG VERSION
A community of practice is a group of people who share knowledge, learns
together, and creates common practices. Communities of practice share
information, insight, experience, and tools about an area of common
interest. This could be a professional discipline–like reservoir
engineering or biology–a skill–like machine repair–or a topic–like a
technology, an industry, or a segment of a production process. Consulting
companies, for example, usually organize communities of practice around both
disciplines, such as organizational change, and industries like banking,
petroleum or insurance. Community members frequently help each other solve
problems, give each other advice, and develop new approaches or tools for
their field. Regularly helping each other makes it easier for community
members to show their weak spots and learn together in the “public space” of
the community. As they share ideas and experiences, people develop a shared
way of doing things, a set of common practices. Sometimes they formalize
these in guidelines and standards, but often they simply remain “what
everybody knows” about good practice. Since communities of practice focus on
topics that people often feel passionately interested in, they can become
important sources of individual identity.
You can find more in Etienne Wenger’s book Communities of Practice (Cambridge
Press 1988) or my Learning Across Teams (Knowledge Management Review Summer
1999).
*Richard McDermott McDermott, McDermott & Co., Phone: 303-545-6030, eMail: Richard@RMcDermott.com Fax: 303-545-6031.
