Although Communities of Practice have become a core concept in understanding how knowledge is managed within organizations, there have been few studies of the praxis of formation of Communities of Practice. In this article, we report on a Grounded Theory study of the members of a previously identified Community of Practice within the UK Higher Education Academy Psychology Network. In addition to providing data on the functioning of the community, the study also revealed a hitherto unrecognized form of community that exhibits all of the characteristics of CoPs yet has only a transient existence that seems to nucleate around an existing core community. Drawing on the metaphor of quantum behaviour, we termed these communities Quantum Communities of Practice. We describe a theory to explain this phenomenon that is grounded in the data from the study. We conclude by discussing the value and validity of our findings and methodology and indicating the next steps we will take in our research.
Masters thesis on social software, or more specifically groupblogs, wikis and social bookmarking and how they support knowledge management and communities of practice
This page looks at Communities of Practice as Distributed Collaborative Work and asks (a) are CoPs collaborative and (b) can they be distributed? (Selected and reviwed links to papers on CoPs)
This paper examines learning among museum staff involved in exhibition development in four European natural history museums. It draws upon a larger body of research undertaken for the Mirror project, a European Commission Framework Programme 5 Information
Review of "WHERE DID THAT COMMUNITY GO? - COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE THAT DISAPPEAR" by Patricia Gongla and Christine R. Rizzuto Chapter 24 in Knowledge Networks: Innovation through Communities of Practice