In this chapter, Wenger shows that knowledge in an organization is one of the greatest assets the organization has. However, many organizations have no way of knowing what they know. Communities of practice are a method for managing knowledge. Wenger argues that knowledge is alive - it exists in experience. Communities of practice are apt at managing knowledge because they do not try to turn knowledge into an artifact or a how-to book. Instead, they provide opportunities for knowledge to be a experience shared by the individuals in the community.

Wenger brings up, but does not talk at any length about, the problem of how communities of practice can be fostered. He described the ideal organizational situation of "double-knit" knowledge, where communities of practice and formal work groups are both in place in the learning cycle. He also cautions that communities of practice are dependent on their own members motivations and interests, and cannot be forced to grow. However, at this point he offers no clear guidance as to how organizations can support and encourage these communities. This question seems particularly important in the development of online communities because so much of the interaction in online communities in pre-determined by the online system the community is using. That system will likely not be created by the users in the community of practice, but by technicians directed by managers and other decision-makers outside of the community of practice. If these decision-makers do not know how to cultivate a community of practice, the resulting system will limit its success.

This chapter attempts to bring
values in the communities of practice into organizational knowledge
enhancement process. As a pretty old book, it was valuable and
illuminating to clarify the ideas that we are familiar with, in a
simple and understandable way, and thus inspiring later thinking and
studying. I have not yet read other chapters of this book, so I am
wondering if it also talks about communities in other settings
different from well-defined organization like a company.
To my
point, the community of practice within a company is very different
from many others like those we are interested in: online communities.
The community aiming to enhance organizational learning seems to be
more like the "networked community" that is discussed in our another
reading of this week (forgetting-:). This community reflects the real
social relations in the working setting and thus can be considerably
constrained by the operation and structure of the organization itself.
This kind of communities embedded in the organizational culture, in
fact, can be a live and important and complementary
entity for organizational knowledge materialization and generator.
Compared to other communities in practice, it is a kind of less
independentlyexisting and more relying on the organization.

I agree with Erin's point that this introductory chapter focuses on the difference between dynamic knowledge and static information. The authors smartly extend this difference into the metaphor of community and database. Communities are always interacting and changing, whereas databases may be stagnant, hidden, or simply dormant until realized and acted upon. This seems like an important point to make for the rest of our discussions this semester.

What I was drawn to even more though, was the brief mentions of authority and peer relationships, which (to my mind) seem essential to any understanding of community. In regards to authority (and in response to one of the many metaphors of "stewarding knowledge") the authors say, "by assigning responsibility to the practitioners themselves to generate and share the knowledge they need, these communities provide a social forum that supports the living nature of knowledge," (12) and later that communiteis of practice are "based on collegial relationships, not reporting relationships. Even community leaders are not your bosses; they are your peers" (20). For the sake of brevity here, I'd like to again point out that this discussion of authority/peers is a discussion that we'll need to consider as we look at the actual interaction of communities.

In the section on "Cultivating Communities of Practice", the authors bring up some important points about the implications of failing to actively cultivate communities of practice. One of these points is that a community of practice may naturally develop (in the absence of active and systematic cultivation) so that the members consist solely of a group of friends, a group of people living in the same geographical area, or a group of people working in the same department within an organization. Or communities of practice may fail to develop at all due to the fact that people don't know about each other.

I think that the idea of visibility has important implications for the development of eCommunities -- who is aware of the eCommunity will dictate who can join and who can join will dictate what knowledge, experience, and expertise is available for contribution. The concept of visibility also has important implications for the ultimate identity and spirit of the resulting eCommunity. 

--- Beth

The authors in this chapter have two main objectives: to introduce communities of practice and point out their significance in “mastering increasingly difficult knowledge challenges” in a world where organizations are becoming more a more segregated and the flow of information for coordination of these units becomes more and more critical.
Through a brief description of the Chrysler case, and other examples, the authors lead to a general observation that functional based organization and the focus on project teams and operational units have two inherent limitations: first, there is localized focus amongst departments which causes various operational inefficiencies and second business units, projects teams etc. have short term, local goals and hence there is really little accumulation of knowledge

Both these problems can be solved by putting the onus of creating and sharing knowledge on the practitioners themselves leading to the formation of a group of people interacting informally on a regular basis to share both tacit and explicit knowledge for professional and personal growth. This eventually leads to a system that "supports the living nature of knowledge".

These are all well elaborated points and introduce the concept of communities of practice nicely. There are however a couple of observations in the paper that I would contest.

The authors talk of the co-location of similar industries (e.g. auto companies in Detroit, flute makers in Boston) as a case for communities of practice. I’m inclined to believe that this is more so because of the availability of infrastructure, labor, favorable laws and other complementary assets rather than primarily because of communities of practice forming around places.

Second, the authors talk of knowledge being social as well as individual and then go on to say that today’s complex problem solving requires multiple perspectives and that the days of “Leonardo Da Vinci are over”. I don’t think today’s problems have got any more complex than the problems that Da Vinci had to solve – they are only different. I’m not sure what the authors imply by the sentence on Leonardo Da Vinci but I disagree that individual decision making will become any less important.

Finally, I’m curious whether the authors‘ recommendations that for the “cultivation” of communities of practice all that the organization can do is build the right environment includes building the right infrastructure to enable that flow of information in the future chapters – because I think that is the place where someone having taken a course like this would make all the difference J

-Satyendra

This chapter starts with a successful example of communities of practice and sketches aspects of ideal communities of practices. I am interested in three questions, which might be answered in the following chapters as I didn’t read the whole book
First, what’s the difference between this community of practice and task-oriented groups in organizations? Are they equal or not? In my opinion, the task oriented group is one special case of community of practice.
Second, what’s the communication language in this community as members are from different professional departments? How do they develop their common language? What’s the efficient part and what’s the inefficient part of this communication?
Third, how do people identify their contribution in this community? According to Kraut’s model, people would contribute more when their contribution are recognized and regarded as important, how to induce more knowledge sharing in this community?
To connect the concept of online community with the community of practice, I think many online communities are communities of practice as people there share their information, knowledge and they are from different profession. Further, the use of online communities would enhance the communication of communities of practice in traditional organizations, such as more efficient knowledge sharing and better information storage techniques.

This article address the role that a community of people, who share a concern or interest in a domain, can play in retaining and propagating knowledge specific to that domain. The author calls these communities “communities of practice”. He illustrates how they can be beneficial by citing the formation of ‘Tech Clubs’ at Chrysler. According to the author these tech clubs played an important role in improving the production of automobiles at Chrysler after a substantial reformation.

While it is easy to see that the information the communities developed was a significant factor in the successful reformation at Chrysler the author notes that it can be difficult for corporations to transform information about a domain into useful knowledge for its employees. Wenger argues that this difficulty arises because of a misconception about the nature of knowledge. According to Wenger knowledge shouldn’t be viewed as an object, but as a living process contained in the actions of the practice. Furthermore knowledge is embedded tacitly in the action of the members and the community. The tacit communal nature of information would seem to be one major reason why knowledge bases often fails to be useful. Wenger suggests that by supporting a community of practice, rather than developing a knowledge base, information can be better retained and supported.

He goes on to suggest several ways that communities of practice can be cultivated, but ultimately this section seemed to acknowledge that it is an organic process and the right circumstance may or may not flourish regardless of effort. His main suggestions are that simply removing barriers and valuing learning will encourage the development of communities of practice.

He goes on to suggest that an organization can benefit from communities of practice if the stewards of knowledge and the processes where the knowledge is applied are tightly interwoven. He refers to this as the “double-knit” organization. Double-knit organization ensures that the stewards retain and refine their knowledge while being able to apply it in a practical manner.

One aspect of this article that I felt was underdeveloped was the role that the tools of a given community play in defining it. Wenger makes a rather strong claim that the products of the community are part of its life. However, he never goes on to say what role they play in embodying knowledge of the community or communicating that knowledge.

I worked briefly in a nascent Knowledge Management(KM) team in an IT services company. Initially it seemed like a reasonable goal, but later I realized that KM is not a goal but a process. Creating a database of documents is not Knowledge Management. The term in itself is a misnomer.

As Wenger explains Knowledge has to be cultivated by providing an environment for people to informally interact and share their expertise. Communities are present even without the efforts of the company, the area around the cofee machine is likely to a meeting place in many offices. People are likely to find similar places naturally. Companies can develop these naturally forming communities can be made more useful by provide a better "coffee machine" and larger informal space. This idea resonates with one of Prof. Gary Olson's SI500 lectures - people bumping into each other in hallways is very valuable for sharing information. In Wenger's words the companies Knowledge Strategy have to define how to provide an environment for these communities to thrive. The authors prescribe a non-linear approach while fostering the communities. Instead of guiding, the communities should be inflected to get maximum alignment with the business objectives. Many types of values can be expected from the communities: short term, long term, tangible, intangible, strategy making and strategy implementing values.

I think the authors didn't stress enough that the communities can't be expected to behave according to the whims of the companies. Like growing a plant there is sinificant chance that communites may not bud to bear any fruit. If it was a simple process, contemporary companies will be overflowing with comunites. These communites also can act against the company. Even before the management reliazes an inoovation in a community, the members could have left the company to form a startup.

Wenger explains companies can't create communities like convential project teams. The members should share information about their practice outside the group. I think the community of practice is like a "third place" within the company. It is a low profile place where socializing is the main activity.

It's interesting to see communities described in the context of corporate "communities of practice." Most interesting is how the authors proceed to tell companies that they can't just brute force communities of practice into existence.

That they must "cultivate communities of practice actively and systematically, for their benefit as well as the benefit of members and communities themselves" speaks for the power of community vs. the power of one (or in this case, corporation as a single entity).

Wenger et al. defined communities of practice as "groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis."  However, in the examples followed, they talked about soccer moms and dads, and this one example is not as similar to other examples (engineers, artists, gang members, etc.) in that soccer moms and dads are not necessarily people interested in soccer the sport, and not even in parenting. Yes, they are all parents, but they go to the game for reasons other than sharing information on parenting.  In other examples, people get together for and share knowledge on the same topic, but soccer moms and dads get together for one reason/topic, but they usually share things about another topic(s).

This is more like a thing called "information ground" (Pettigrew, 1999), where people get together for one (not-information-sharing) reason, but start to share information on other (unrelated) topic.  The soccer moms and dads are a good example: they go to the game for the kids, but they share a lot information unrelated to soccer (or even kids!).  However, for online communities, though people do share unrelated information, I am not sure whether we can call it "information ground", since people go online to share/get information.

===  

Pettigrew, K. E. (1999).
Waiting for chiropody: contextual results from an ethnographic study of the
information behaviour among attendees at community clinics. Information
Processing & Management, 35, 801-817.

This chapter provides reasons why business units need communities of practices to manage knowledge. First of all, when business units are constantly changing, communities of practice provide the stability. In addition, communities of practices help to establish identity, since people in different departments are connected through this mechanism.

I agree that in order to achieve the full potential of communities of practices, organizations should take active steps to encourage them. This is because employees need motivations to participate. Moreover, some conflicts might occur to reduce employees’ willingness to join them. For example, employees and departments may compete with others within one company and are reluctant to share knowledge. Therefore, I am curious how to establish and manage communities of practices.

Also, author explained the structure of communities practices are based on collegial relationships, not reporting relationships. “Even community leaders are not your bosses; they are your peers.” However, I am wondering if participants are comfortable to share ideas freely or argue with their bosses if these bosses just sit by their side. Therefore, if all interactions of communities of practices are happened in an online environment, will this make any differences?

Some thoughts on Wenger, et al....

There is an elitist focus here, on experts and experience. though admittedly expert practitioners (18) not "ivory tower" experts.

Although, I like the section on "cultivating," it is still gardener-centric. In my recent work on "Social Publishing" I coin the similar term "culturing" to emphasize the peer-to-peer nature of the process of creating culture via shared values, assumptions, understandings, knowledge, and practice.

They claim "you cannot violate the natural developmental processes." (14)
But are these processes "real" and if so are they knowable? Moreover, who gets to say what those processes are?

Communities of practice were significant in Silicon Valley as they shared knowledge across institutional boundaries (i.e. firms. See Anna Lee Saxenian's work....)

For those interested:
"What are communities of practice? A comparative review of four seminal works" by Andrew Cox

The statement "Community leaders are not your bosses; they are your peers." (20) seems to me to ignore some harsh realities about power, but conversely it highlights the fact that the relationship between two individuals can be different in different environments, e.g. hierarchical in an institution, but peer-to-peer in a community of practice.

Nevertheless, the crucial element is certainly interesting:
A changing environment (work) is counterbalanced by the fact that your "source of stability is your community of practice [colleagues]." (20)

Footnotes:
Citation of Drucker, Polanyi, Latour, Krackhardt, Malone, etc.
(see footnote 26 for social network resources)

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PHartzog@umich.edu
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The Universe is made up of stories, not atoms.
--Muriel Rukeyser

This is a great piece on the importance of cultivating communities of practice. Much of the emphasis is on the importance within organizations, especially now that so many companies are global. But the lessons can be applied to many other, more informal situations as well.

I think the most important lesson learned is that the best thing to do to cultivate these communities of practice is to give them the resources and support they need, and removing barriers. Sounds easy, but this is probably hard in practice. This is a lesson many companies could stand to learn.

There's a good analogy I like in the chapter about how to cultivate the communities of practice:

"A plant does its own growing, whether its seed was carefully planted or blown into place by the wind. You cannot pull the stem, leaves, or petals to make a plant grow faster or taller. However, you can do much to encourage healthy plants: till the soil, ensure they have enough nutrients, supply water, secure the right amount of sun exposure, and protect them from pests and weeds. There are also a few things we know not to do, like pulling up a plant to check if it has good roots." (p12-13)