Back in 2003, Steven J. Schweitzer published a document "The Core of Online Communities of Practice" as studies by CALDOL (West Point). He says in the introduction of his paper that (and figure this was 2003):
The US Army is considering utilizing Communities of Practice to fill the white space between the formal school system and people currently in the field doing the real jobs. In the spring of 2003 the United States Military Academy (USMA) formed the Center for the Advancement of Leader Development and Organizational Learning (CALDOL) to officially explore Communities of Practice and their potential uses in the US Army educational system. The people of CALDOL (Major Nate Allen, Major Tony Burgess, Major Peter Kilner and Major Steven Schweitzer) were already running two major CoPs (CompanyCommand.com and PlatoonLeader.org) on their own time with their own money.
That is just for the setting. Later in his paper he describes the double-loop learning from Argyris and Schön in this context which is worth exploring. The CoPs play a key secondary role by keeping those at the formal school informed about the current issues and best practices in the field. Take a look at the action-research Theory-in-Use which can be found here and the link to innovation and social learning systems
A social system learns whenever it acquires new capacity for behaviour, and learning may take the form of undirected interaction between systems… [G]overnment as a learning system carries with it the idea of public learning, a special way of acquiring new capacity for behaviour in which government learns for the society as a whole. In public learning, government undertakes a continuing, directed inquiry into the nature, causes and resolution of our problems.
This happened at 12:13:31 PM or
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