Earlier this week I had a meeting with a VET professional about a raft of organisational development issues at her large TAFE Institute. Just one of the topics we discussed was how to foster communities of practice.

But first a definition is required. There are many definitions of communities of practice in the literature but a simple and useful one provided by Lesser & Storck (2001, p.831) is that they are ‘a group whose members regularly engage in sharing and learning, based on their common interests’.

Although they recognise that each community is unique in the type of support it requires from the organisation, Lesser and Everest (2001) provide some general guidelines for communities of practice that can be applied in many situations: 

1. Focus resources on communities that have strategic implications for the organisation
2. Provide the community with the time and space to interact
3. Designate roles and responsibilities to support the community
4. Market the community and its success stories. 

Wenger, McDermott and Snyder (2002) suggest seven principles for cultivating communities of practice:

1. Design for evolution, so that the community can grow and change, for instance when new members bring new interests to the group
2. Open a dialogue between the inside and outside perspective, with insiders providing deep understanding of the community issues and outsiders helping members to see wider possibilities
3. Invite different levels of participation, allowing members to participate in ways that suit their level of interest
4. Develop both public and private community spaces, so that all levels of relationships can flourish. Public spaces are meetings and using an online forum; private spaces are one-on-one encounters, either face-to-face or electronically.
5. Focus on value, because communities thrive when they deliver value to the organisation and to the members
6. Combine familiarity and excitement, satisfying members’ needs for both comfort and divergent thinking
7. Create a rhythm for the community, through regular meetings, teleconferences, online interactions and informal events, mixing idea-sharing forums and tool-building projects (pp.49-64).

Fostering and supporting communities of practice requires high-level skills. To develop these high-level skills we can tap into useful literature on communities of practice and the increasing expertise in the VET sector. But there is no escaping the subtle, sophisticated work involved.

I discuss these and related isssues in Chapter 3 of my report The Potential for Communities of Practice to Underpin the National Training Framework.

The report is available at http://reframiningthefuture.net (click on ‘Publications’ then click on ‘Sub-program 4).