Organisations are now taking communities of practice seriously and over the last 7 years or so we have learned alot about how to best establish and foster what is essentially an organic and sometimes fragile entity.
This lens points to the blog posts and articles over at Anecdote which we think you will find useful in supporting your own communities of practice.
Useful blog posts
- Simple rules for CoP self-organisation
- Some simple rules to harness community self-organisation.
- Motivating community formation
- Ways to get a community going.
- Community of practice principles
- Basic principles which act as the foundation for decisions.
- CoP support team
- The vital role of the CoP support team.
- Components of a community of practice
- The basic components of a community of practice.
- Using online technology to support a Communities of Practice
- This is proving to be a popular model to encourage action within a community of practice.
- Community indicators, indicator species and persausion
- Ways to understand the health of your community.
- More about community indicators
- Building on Nancy White's ideas of indicators.
- Organic approach to getting a community started
- A slow and incremental approach to starting a CoP.
Relevant Anecdote articles
Communities of practice
- Harnassing tacit knowledge with communities
- This paper offers some tips for fostering informal communities to harnass tacit knowledge in a rapidly changing business environment.
Books that have influenced our thinking on CoPs
Cultivating Communities of Practice
Amazon Price: $23.10 (as of 07/05/2009) 
Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity
Amazon Price: $35.99 (as of 07/05/2009)
Leveraging Communities of Practice for Strategic Advantage
Amazon Price: $31.35 (as of 07/05/2009)
