The Mature Stages of Development

We can divide the life of one company in different stages. We cannot forget the supporters that make the community bigger and bigger continues being important in the maturity.

Maturity

Is in this period when is more difficult the equilibrium between the new members that can make a “revolution” in the topics and ideas that are written in the community and all the good things they bring with their opinions and knowledge. So There are tensions between focus and grouth, and are the administrators who can do it more soft. Its normal do a reorganization with the objective of make the community useful for everybody.

The Challenge of Distributed Communities

all communities are distributed to some degree.

When these four factors distance, size, organizational affiliation, and cultural differences are

compounded, they make building and sustaining communities significantly more difficult.

In one global community headquarters and field people have different points of view about what their community should be about. The most difficult in this matter is define the focus because each one has different ideas.

Trust and Personal Relationships

In local communities there are more opportunities for spontaneous networking and making new contacts than in a big one.

The new affiliations also make more difficult tell your confidence to this new members so when one community is gowing up too fast is normal talk about neutral topics than enter in an important professional ideas or personal staffs, its normal think they can use this information against you.

Also cultural differences often make trust and personal

relationships more difficult. Normally connect with others

from their own cultural background is more comfortable. When people with time know others with different cultural traditions or points of view about some terms, normally increase the

 sense of connection with people from different parts of their own country, but they diminished their sense of belonging to the whole. Is important work to put a solution in this type of problems and work better.

Craft Intimacy

In the way you increase the craft intimacy and trust between people in distributed divisions,

they continuous talking more and more, making the information more useful and easy to aplicate.

Communities of practice create the common talent pool globalization requires. People in different part of the world working in the same topic, in the same project, just because all of them have something to offer, making the work more productive and eficience.

In the past companies worked in groups with workers and a manager who earn more money and can organized the team, when this group is bigger maybe the manager is from a different

discipline who cannot truly understand the technical contribution of other workers. When you are working in a virtual team often you don’t see the others for a long time, maybe you don’t know his face because you have ever seen them, you only know the team member in the same location than you. In global companies team leather can be from another discipline, a different region or country or different bussines unit. Normally they change their locations leaving projects, communities are basic to this projects, they give it more stability. Communities of

practice can create a deep sense of organizational belonging independent

of location and day-to-day job responsibilities.

SEVEN PRINCIPLES FOR CULTIVATION COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE

We can find seven supports of a professional Community of practice, I will pass directly to resume those attending the principal characteristics of them.

It’s important to take an account the design. It will be improving in the way that members of it want, creating websites, forums… growing up in the most famous or interesting topics.

The second support is the view that others and the members have about the community. It’s important be objective, open minded with the others points of view but respect it and try to learn what others can teach you. Small communities normally are helped by the bigger, this is normal and good, because this type of knowledge is universal and good for everybody.

There are differents levels of implication in the community. Creatives and administrators, the high level and with more fuctions on it; more active members and secondary members: they are more or less 95 per cent of the members and a lot of them don’t write normally, only take information or write ideas or studies with different values.

The topics in a community can be prepared in private or public spaces. Normally when one of them is good finish in public spaces where everybody can show their opinion and make it more useful.

The ambient in a community is one of the most important support because when you feel secure and convince u can give your opinion and other members will take an account seriously is when members will work and express all they want making more productive the site for example.

The seventh support and also important is the steady pace, and this depends on when do you publish new topics in the community, for example one blog like this will have more visits when you publish something and announce it on favebook or twiter than 3 days later.

Communities of Practice and Their Structural Elements

.A Structural Model: Domain, Community, and Practice



A community of practice is a unique combination of three fundamental elements:

• The domain creates common ground and a sense of common identity. The domain inspires members to contribute, participate, and be actives in this work. Shared domain creates a sense of accountability to a body of knowledge and therefore to the development of a practice. In a community you can explain since how to cook an ege, to how built an skycraper, the level of the conversation its made for the members in the comunity. This disciplines are changing with the time, the people in the community decide about what they want to talk in the different momments. The domain must inspire this members to work on it and dont leave their studies, and have to be interesting also for the company because if it's not can be margined.

• The community create the space where, with respect and trust, the differents actors can explain their knowledge and expose the questions that they try to know.

• The practice is a set of frameworks, ideas, tools, information,styles, language, stories, and documents that community members share. When a community has been established for some time, members expect each other to have mastered the basic knowledge of the community.

Forms of Participation

Some people participate because they care about the domain and want to see it developed. Others because they want to have a community, interact with peers, people who share something important. For those who have devoted most of their lives to learning one profession, connecting with others who share that passion is rewarding in itself. A place where people

can make a contribution and know it will genuinely be appreciated. Other members simply want to learn about the practice: what standards have been established, what tools work well, what lessons have been learned by master practitioners. The opportunity to learn new things.

Communities of Practice and Their Value to Organizations

Communities of practice have become a useful tool for different groups of specialists talking to each other and can be used to transmit information efficiently about the knowledge that each draws from his work.
Companies such as Chrysler were the pioneers in this work group and thus managed to reduce the time for making a vehicle by more than half. This makes it again more competitive with their archrival Toyota. E-book created a large database where engineers of different vehicles record their progress so that it can be shared with others. This idea is not new, as men have been joining in groups to share knowledge, this is a new formula to develop sets of skills and even improve relationships for a long time now.

Knowledge and art are the best weapons to stay in the market and remain competitive. The big risk now is that companies that have information have to be careful that they don´t leak it to other companies.

Knowledge is constantly moving forward, this does not mean that what we know today is a lie tomorrow, but we will know more about it in the future.
Communities of practice are a natural part of the organization life. Your health depends largely on the voluntary commitment of its members and the emergence of internal leadership. Moreover, its capacity as administrator knowledge as a living process depends on some degree of informality and autonomy.

Organizations can do a lot to create an environment where they can prosper: valuing the learning they do, so there is more time and other resources available for their work. It also encourages more participation and removing barriers. Creating such an environment also involves the integration of communities in the organization, giving them a voice to make decisions and the legitimacy to influence operating units. Also the developments of the internal management processes are important because they can create value. These working groups create great advantages for the company and members of the community, progress in the short term are the basis of what will happen in the long term.
The multimembership learning cycle is the addition to communities of practice to other parties in proceedings which together make up the intelligence business.

Finally, projects come and go, but communities are more constant. They are not always changing practice and are therefore more stable. You might not know where you will work in the future, but you know you will belong to a community. It is possible to argue that the stability provided by the communities of practice is good, but organizations can respond in a better way to the changing market demands.
As a result, leading organizations of knowledge are becoming increasingly aware that communities of practice are not only supporting structures, but basic structures on which to build the organization.