Paul Hearn pointed at the Knowledgeboard SIG on CoP's to a new publication of Monica Miranda Silva from the European Union on communities of practice and the "knowledge driven economy".
The idea is to explore communities as microcosms of new ideas where difference -of thinking, being and acting- is actually happening. The aim of this report is to be an opportunity to explain why sustaining communities should be part of the organisation’s plan..
The vision of the author is to look at communities from the perspective of a new organization model that envisions life-long learning. This transformation cannot be done through the crossing of boundaries.
Most of the publication is actually about general communities of practice materials with little focus on the academic and more on the pragmatic and experiential side of CoP's. A very weak point in the paper is the piece about "Innovation" (part V) which reflects on the shift from 'information' to 'knowledge' and contemplates on what 'knowledge' actually means, but does not link the communities of practice to innovation - the word is not even repeated in the section.. and does not come back in later sections either.
There seems to be little attention for the online versus the offline exponent of communities; it is almost suggested that communities merely exist in the electronic (..) world - especially when a hint about the future is given. The author is very close to this when the issue of 'trust' in communities is discussed on page 30 ("it does not matter whether online or offline"), with quotes from Rheingold / Kimball and Sveiby.
The paper concludes with a list of the larger, well-know community of practice constellations of Xerox, Shell etc. What I liked was the transcript of the interview with Paul Hearn from the EU about 'his' community project of Knowledgeboard, providing an overview of the history and present state of the project. It would have been nice to be more elaborate on interviewing members of the community and members of the communities outlined in the 'business application for communities of practice'.
If you are keen on reading this general paper on communities, you can download the report at the website of European Union's Information Society "eWork" here. My recommendation is to continue reading the references straight away, including Weinberger, Wenger and (funny enough not listed) the Kimball reference from the text.
This happened at 12:46:27 AM or
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