Luís Paulo Santos
Luís Nuno Barbosa
ABSTRACT
A Community of Practice (CoP) allows practitioners of a clearly defined domain to share knowledge, experience, and best practices. It provides a social context for practitioners, often distributed across multiple organizations, and emerged over the last few decades as a fundamental mechanism for knowledge sharing, management, and generation within organizations. Best practices, innovations, and solutions to shared problems first emerge within CoPs. These are, and must be perceived as, an investment in organizations' future and competitiveness.
Establishing a CoP is a straightforward process, the most challenging factor being the recruitment of members to attain critical mass. The challenge is to maintain the CoP active, with members contributing with high quality, innovative content. Increasing a CoP's medium / long-term survival probabilities requires careful planning to avoid incurring in some well-known pitfalls.
This paper proposes and discusses a set of nine guidelines for establishing and maintaining a community of practice within the context of Electronic Governance (EGOV) and Government Chief Information Officers (GCIO). This research was motivated by the initiative of the government of a developing country. Results are based on a review of the relevant literature, together with the detailed analysis of interviews to members or coordinators of large communities of practice. This analysis was further validated against the opinions of public servants directly involved on EGOV-GCIO-related functions during two focus groups meetings.
- E. Wenger, R. McDermott e W. Snyder, Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge, Harvard Business Press, 2002. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- S. E. Booth, "Cultivating Knowledge Sharing and Trust in Online Communities for Educators," Journal of Educational Computing Research, vol. 47, pp. 1--31, 2012.Google ScholarCross Ref
- D. Garson, Public Information Technology and E-governance: Managing the Virtual State, Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2006.Google Scholar
- L. C. Li, J. M. Grimshaw, C. Nielsen, M. Judd, P. C. Coyte, I. D. Graham, "Use of communities of practice in business and health care sectors: a systematic review. Implementation Science, 4(1), 27, 2009.Google ScholarCross Ref
- G. Ranmuthugala, J. Plumb, F. Cunningham, A. Georgiou, J. Westbrook e J. Braithwaite, "Communities of Practice in the Health Sector: A systematic review of the literature," Sydney, 2010.Google Scholar
- E. W. Jean Lave, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Cambridge University Press, 1991.Google ScholarCross Ref
- F. Nickols, "Characteristics of A Community of Practice (CoP)," 2012. {Online}. Available: http://www.nickols.us/CoPCharacteristics.htm. {Acedido em 2016}.Google Scholar
- Centre for Innovative & Entrepreneurial Leadership, "Communities Life Cycle Matrix," 2014. {Online}. Available: http://theciel.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Communities-Matrix-CIEL-v-2.2-.pdf. {Acedido em 2016}.Google Scholar
- P. Gongla e C. R. Rizzuto, "Evolving communities of practice: IBM Global Services experience," IBM Systems Journal, vol. 40, pp. 842--862, 2001. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Project: Connected Online Communities, "Online Communities for Educators: Guidelines for Planning and Implementation," 2011.Google Scholar
- Project: Connected Online Communities, "Technology for Online Communities of Practice," 2011.Google Scholar
- A. A. Carvalho, "To Enliven Virtual Communities of Practice through Gamification," EAI Endorsed Transactions on Serious Games, vol. 15, 2015.Google Scholar
- Connected Educators, "Resources and Tools for Evaluation of Online Communities of Practice," 2011. {Online}. Available: http://connectededucators.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/707_COCP-Evaluation-Brief-July_2011.pdf. {Acedido em 2016}.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Communities of Practice as a tool to support the GCIO function
Recommendations
Communities of practice: dare to share the knowledge
SIGUCCS '04: Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM SIGUCCS conference on User servicesCommunities of practice are not a new idea, but they are being looked at more closely as an important tool for learning and mastering knowledge challenges. Communities of practice often lend themselves to a particular strategic intent for their ...
Online communities for teachers and lifelong learners: a framework for comparing similarities and identifying differences in communities of practice and communities of interest
In recent years online and blended communities have become a popular topic among educationalists. In this paper we present a framework that supports the analysis, development and maintenance of online and blended communities. This is applied to two ...
Managers and members in online communities of practice: what are they talking about?
dg.o '14: Proceedings of the 15th Annual International Conference on Digital Government ResearchOnline communities of practice are becoming important organizational arenas. Much literature about online communities describes them as environments based on user-generated content. This article shifts the focus from community members to the managers, ...
Comments