Virtual Community of Practice - On-Line Communities of Practice

On-Line Communities of Practice

Communities of Practice like Sap’s SDN developer network, Adobe’s XMP forum, Sermo for physicians, or domain-specific corporate-internal communities such as those found at HP, revolve around people's professional or vocational needs for connections, information, identity, and sense of belonging. Communities of practice are about what people do for a living.

They address the needs that people have which can not easily be satisfied with traditional resources such as broadcast media, formal publications, academia, and ad-hoc associations or relationships. Online communities of practice run the gamut from forums, faqs, to email list serves. Offline communities of practice include user groups such as ASUG and eBay’s annual “Live” event.

Communities of practice provide a critical resource to professionals who want and need recommendations, pointers, tips and tricks, best practices, insights and innovations. Part of what makes a community practice strong is the aggregation of relevance; that is, people and information related to a coherent set of topics which certain people will find interesting, useful, and potentially profitable. Communities of practice lift us up to support us, to help us achieve our aspirations, reach our goals, and to be of service.

(Wenger, White & Smith 2009) argue that virtual communities change the way we think of community and that technology stewardship is a key element of virtual communities of practice by making virtual communities independent of any one technology.