What is community of practice in knowledge management?

knowledge management (KM), learning, A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who share a common interest and interact often to learn from each other to advance their work.

Why are community of practice important and how can they impact the culture within an organization?

Supporting cross-team communities of practice will go a long way toward breaking down those barriers and fostering better appreciation for how others work. This can improve communication, reduce duplication, increase knowledge sharing across the organisation and make it easier for work to flow.

What is the role of community of practices?

Communities of practice are important as a professional learning strategy, because they have the potential to: Capture and share existing knowledge to help people improve their practice by providing a forum to identify solutions to common problems and a process to collect and evaluate best practices.

How does CoP contribute to the success of knowledge management?

CoPs have become a tool for knowledge management to support or stimulate learning in the organization by enhancing knowledge exchange and organizational learning (Mittendorff et al. 2006). It is this learning mechanism that is known to contribute to the need of collaborative activities in the community.

What is a community of practice and how can we support it?

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. By engaging each other over time in collective learning, they develop a bond that in turn fuels the production of resources to influence their own practices.

What makes a successful community of practice?

The most important part of communities of practice is the consistent and regular communication and sharing of best practices, case studies, and data. This ongoing interaction enables professionals to learn and implement new strategies that would otherwise not be on their radar or in their wheelhouse.

What benefits do Communities of practice provide?

Other potential advantages of communities of practice:

• Encourage knowledge sharing to lead to cultural change.
• Support organisational development and research.
• Share good practice.
• Transfer and develop best practice.
• Reuse information.
• Learn from previous mistakes.
• Encourage personal and professional development.

How do communities of practice transform their practices?

Results suggest that the transformation of practices occurs through a four-stage process: (1) members adopt needs and corresponding practices through participation in other communities; (2) individual members recognize needs which are unmet by existing community practices; (3) a shared recognition in the importance of …

How do communities of practice develop and contribute?

Communities of practice often focus on sharing best practices and creating new knowledge to advance a domain of professional practice. Many communities of practice rely on face-to-face meetings as well as web-based collaborative environments to communicate, connect and conduct community activities.

What benefits do communities of practice provide?

Why are communities of practice important in sharing tacit knowledge?

CoPs are informal networks that enable professionals to develop a shared meaning, engage in knowledge building and help to stimulate knowledge flow among the members. Effectively cultivated CoPs can be an important strategy for tapping and harnessing tacit knowledge and facilitating knowledge sharing.

What are communities of practice in education?

In community of practice theory derived from the sociocultural perspective, it is argued that people construct and develop their identities and understanding through their active participation and engagement with others in cultural practices that are situated in a particular social communities, such as in a teacher …