Efios

"(the study) indicates that sponsors and leaders who are active in the same functional area (e.g., logistic processes, production and maintenance processes) meet regularly to form a '"governance committee". This committee discusses and assesses the overall activity of the various CoPs in their specific functional area of the organization. The committee regularly assesses whether each CoP's activity makes strategic sense for the organization, and how these activities can be presented to the top management to obtain additional financial support.

A great example of the application of CoPs in a religious and social environment. "Baptist Churches of SA
Communities of Practice Across our Churches there is a community of ministry leaders which the Baptist Churches of SA seeks to encourage, empower and equip. As these leaders share, collaborate and learn together they strengthen our Churches. Among this leadership community is the necessary expertise, networks and relationships to encourage and extend our Churches' ministry practice."

http://sabaptist.asn.au/cop-home.html

In the area of climate change actions, the Lagos State Government would likely devise a long-term strategy for building the capacity to: link knowledge of climate change to action; develop and implement a plan of action; and, deliver on its development objectives. On a capacity-for-climate-change agenda, the state government was charged to build the multi-disciplinary communities of practice to assess GHG emissions, climate-related risks and vulnerabilities, and mitigation and adaptation options.

Adapted from: Nigeria Independent Online

An interesting research paper on the use of communities of practice in the Ontario health sector. For this research, KTA (Knowledge-to-Action) refers to the movement of research and experience-based knowledge between social contexts, and the use of that knowledge to improve practice. It says:

The social, technological and business domain are visualized in this high level mindmap, made by P. White of the Jet Propulsion Lab of NASA. It is a much more extensive version that the one that we did in 2007, which only considered a more detailed part of the three domains, and on top the "Personal Learning" domain. Well worth reflecting on in BP initiatives.

The full image can be seen here

Thomas Annamma published just before the weekend a "best practice" paper on using communities of practice for developing countries. It's called "Sharing best practices through online communities of practice" and provides a very brief and bulleted overview of the Capacity Project and GAPS. The endeavour has been limited in scope and can be considered more like a pilot than a full-scale initiative, but those interested in the subject can use it for further inquiry with the authors.

With user-generated content, the network size (i.e., number of contributors to particular content) can vary. Research on prediction markets, virtual teams, and social networks suggests that the quality of aggregate information, number of ideas generated, and likelihood of a valuable answer increases with the number of participants. Because each contributor represents a unique source of knowledge, additional contributors can identify important missing information or factual inaccuracies. The more people who contribute, the more thorough and high-value information the content contains.