CoP intro
Communities of Practice connect people to knowledge, knowledge to people and people to people.
A growing number of people and organisations in various sectors are now focusing on Communities of Practice as a key method to improving their performance.
Communities of Practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavour:
- a group of engineers working on similar problems
- a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques
- a group of newly qualified teachers seeking support in their first year of teaching
- a network of self employed and small businesses that seek to work in partnership
- a non for profit organisation seeking to capture issues affecting a community at grass roots level
- a gathering of first-time managers helping each other cope and so on...
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CoP overview
Not everything called a community is a Community of Practice. A neighbourhood for instance, is often called a community, but is usually not a Community of Practice. There are 3 key characteristics that make up a Community of Practice:
Community
- Members who are willing to share information, participate in joint conversations, build networks and relationships and learn from one another.
Domain
- All or part of the community work together and have an identity defined by a shared domain of interest.
Practice
- Members of a Community of Practice are practitioners, their shared repertoire of resources, experiences, stories, tools and ways of addressing shared problems from the domain forms shared and "best" practice.
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get started
deBurca is experienced in developing, nurturing and supporting Communities of Practice through a mixture of traditional people networking and development into web based social networking applications.
In a nutshell: Communities of Practice are groups of people who share a concern or passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.
deBurca is an authorised reseller of Tomoye ecco and Tomoye Simplify Community of Practice software.
Tomoye is the Community of Practice Company™
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