Community of practice

From Wikinfo

The organizational development (OD) concept of a community of practice (abbreviated as CoP) refers to the process of social learning that occurs when people in organizations, who have a common interest in some subject or problem, collaborate to share ideas, find solutions, and build innovations.

It is contrasted with an epistemic community, in that it is strongly focused on a single discipline, and therefore more suited for knowledge management as opposed to knowledge creation.

A wiki (such as Wikipedia.org) can be thought of as an online CoP.

The first person to develop the CoP term was theorist Etienne Wenger. http://www.ewenger.com/

Related to

• knowledge management
• organizational learning

Links

• http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/404/lesser.html
• http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/index.shtml

References

• Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Community_of_practice" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_practice, used under the GNU Free Documentation License