Community of Practice and social networks Article [3]

This concept was first put forth by two anthropologists, namely Barbara Rogoff (1985) and Jean Lave. Later Lave along with Etienne Wenger developed this concept furthermore coined the term Communities of Practice. (Wikipedia 2006) and this is not a new concept, most of us are a part of at least one such community or group knowingly or unknowingly. Communities of Practice are a group of people who share common interests and these people come together to achieve common goals. It also helps people to solve problems in their area of expertise. (Hass, et al 2002) they are not a static group but they evolve and adapt continuously. CoP is a way of sharing knowledge. And now CoPs are adapted by most of the organizations as the means of improving the knowledge. Wenger (1998) also considers community of practice as a combination of identity theory, theories of practice, theories of social structure and situated experience (Rohde., et al 2006)

The intension behind starting or joining a community of practice may vary from person to person. Some people join to share the knowledge they have obtained, some want to gain more knowledge or gain better understanding. Staring a community of practice in an organization is a very difficult task. It requires a great amount of motivation and support from the management. It requires leaders or leadership quality in people who can start a learning culture in an organization and motivate others to join and share the knowledge. But usually CoPs in organizations are not very successful for several reasons, either there is a cultural clash or the groups tend to move away from the actual purpose.

Communication in CoP occurs formal and informal, formal in a sense arrange a meeting or conference where members can meet face to face and discusses and share their ideas and this is the best known method because a sense of trust is built when you meet people face to face but unfortunately organization have reduced such meetings or conferences to reduce their expenses and have switched to virtual conferences and informally means using the current technologies like net meeting, audio visual conferencing these means of communication does help to some extent but does not help to build the level of trust required to share knowledge .

Another reason why formal or face to face communication is better over its counterpart is that because this type of communication is more transparent or visible and humans respond better when things are clear (Ackerman., et al 2003) the author explains it a nice example if there are two doors one made of wood and with a caution sign “open slowly” and other one made of glass with no sign boards, its obvious that the second door will have least accidents compared to the other one as it is clearly visible
Social Networks are also considered as Virtual CoP, it can be found in many literatures that humans perform better when they are in groups or in a network of people. (Chung., et al 2007) A Social network from my understanding is a group of people or organizations that are interconnected and they communicate directly or indirectly to share their interests- it can be anything from personal to professional.

One of the best example I came across is of Chrysler group which is basically a vehicle manufacturing company where CoP is put to best use and they call it as Electronic Book Of Knowledge [EBOK] Here they use the concept of "Lessons Learned" or "Best Practices” which is adapted from the ideas put forth by Wenger and snyder in 2000. And the engineers at Chrysler refer to it as tech clubs where they share the knowledge. Chrysler is also well know for its outstanding success story for reusing the lessons learned and best practices and significantly reducing the cost and process simplification. (Ackerman., et al 2003)
When I was working with my previous employer which was a Microsoft technical support organization and I was in MS outlook support and my job was to solve client’s problem related to outlook, me and my colleagues got all kinds of weird calls with weired problems and we managed to solve them and during the coffee break we gathered around and discuss the weird problems faced by the clients and use to have a good laugh, so next time someone receives a same or similar problem we managed to solve very quickly. What we didn’t realize that, this sharing of knowledge in the form of jokes became a routine. Unfortunately none of these solutions where documented.

References:

1. Wikipedia 2006 Website : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_practice

2. Roland Hass, Wilfried Aulbur and Sunil Thakar and edited by mark Ackerman, Volkmar pipek and Volker Wulf Sharing Expertise - Beyond Knowledge Management 2003

3. Thomas Erickson and Wendy A. Kellogg Knowledge Communities edited by Mark Ackerman, Volkmar pipek, Volker Wulf Sharing Expertise - Beyond Knowledge Management 2003

4. Kon Shing Kenneth Chung, Liaquat Hossain, Joseph Davis Individual Performance in Knowledge Intensive Work
Website: http://library.mdx.ac.uk:2059/10.1145/1240000/1235036/p159-chung.pdf?key1=1235036&key2=4217164321&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=22381609&CFTOKEN=94892644

5. Markus Rohde, Ralf Klamma, Volker Wulf Establishing Communities of Practice among Students and Start-Up Companies
Website: http://library.mdx.ac.uk:2059/10.1145/1150000/1149361/p514-rohde.pdf?key1=1149361&key2=8296164321&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=22381609&CFTOKEN=94892644