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.