Community of Practice for Community Builders
Our Community of Practice for Community Builders meets monthly, alternating evening and daytime hours, brief and in-depth conversations, and is offered virtually and in person at our new office in the Midtown/Hough area.
Our community of practice (CoP) is a open to anyone interested in building community. Participants can share concerns, get help with a problem, get good information and/or learn something new as it relates to work of grassroots organizing.
Each CoP session offers best practices and new knowledge to advance the professional practice of community building. Participation on an ongoing basis is helpful but not required; drop in as your time allows. “It’s an invitation, not an obligation.”
Our CoP was built on face-to-face meetings in our original office at the Agora building. In the earliest weeks of the pandemic shutdown in the spring of 2020, we developed a template for a virtual experience. VCoP was offered weekly to provide support and good information in a highly stressful time when clear and reliable information was difficult to obtain and share with community members.
We look to offer a mix of in-person and web-based collaborative environments to communicate, connect and conduct community activities.
What are communities of practice?
Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. They are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on similar problems, a clique of pupils defining their identity in the school, a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques, a gathering of first-time managers helping each other cope.
Communities develop their practice through a variety of activities:
Problem solving
“Can we work on this design and brainstorm some ideas; I’m stuck.”
Request for information
“Where can I find the code to connect to the server?”
Seeking experience
“Has anyone dealt with a customer in this situation?”
Reusing assets
“I have a proposal for a local area network I wrote for a client last year. I can send it to you and you can easily tweak it for this new client.”
Coordination and synergy
“Can we combine our purchases of solvent to achieve bulk discounts?”
Building an argument
“How do people in other countries do this? Armed with this information it will be easier to convince my Ministry to make some changes.”
Growing confidence
“Before I do it, I’ll run it through my community first to see what they think.”
Discussing new developments
“What do you think of the new CAD system? Does it really help?”
Documenting projects
“We have faced this problem five times now. Let us write it down once and for all.”
Visits
“Can we come and see your after-school program? We need to establish one in our city.”
Identifying gaps in competence
“Who knows what, and what are we missing? What other groups should we connect with?”
What is the origin of the term ‘community of practice’?
While people have learned together through informal communities of practice throughout history, the primary use of the concept originated in learning theory. Cognitive anthropologists Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger coined the term “community of practice” when studying apprenticeships as a learning model—the term referred to the community that acts as a living curriculum. Once named, the researchers started to see communities everywhere, even when no formal apprenticeship system existed.
To learn more about the origins and theory of communities of practice, see:
http://wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice
