I thought I could list all practical examples I gathered so far, so that if people want to know about communities of practices in a development cooperation context I can refer to this blogpost. The list is longer than I thought: Community of ICT4D trainers ILO/CIARIS experiences in lusophone Africa Communities of practice in India CoP in Ghana Tech forum in Kumasi, Ghana The community empowerment network in Central Asia Ayuda Urbana, a cop on urban development in Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean Communities of practice at CARE International E-collaboration

One of them was: how can blogs support communities of practice? community of practice can have a public teamblog. An example of a teamblog is the ecollaboration weblog . An example is the weblog Everything you always wanted to know about capacity development . (Cartoon via tangwailing blog ) I observed that Stan Garfield blogs about questions he receives or overhears about knowledge management. That made me think that I could blog some of the questions I get (+ the answers).

In our first post on Communities of Practice (CoPs) we disabused ourselves of the confusion between a community and the platform that allows a community to interact together online. An example might be to have the learners apply their learnings “out in the world” then come back and report on what they learned, questions they had and, if relevant, how application changed their understanding of the material. This is the fifth in a series of blog posts I wrote for  Darren Sidnick . I

It is a couple of weeks since our last set of online community examples , with trips to the Marketing 2.0 But we’re returning today with a great set of examples from the healthcare industry. Online communities for healthcare can provide real insight and real support as the examples below show. Conference in Paris and Web Mission 09 in San Francisco taking up much of our time and space on the blog. Online communities in healthcare

you have ever hankered to read a “real life” story about an organic community of practice, one free from the business pressures of CoPs manufactured inside of corporations, read this book. Identifying a new practice and refining it.) listserv or web forum, Twitter, etc.)   Spidergram examples of the Central Park Birdwatchers - click for larger image My friend Sue Wolff generously lent me two books recently. The first, Marie Winn’s “ Red-Tails in Love ” captured my heart and mind.

In the example above the different colours represent different areas of content, targeted at different types of users. At Made by Many we practice a very iterative and rapid approach to wireframes. The client was paying for them as part of an agency’s ‘set piece’ best practice. I have a love hate relationship with wireframes. In the last 10 years they’ve been a part of every web project I’ve worked on.

A busy week at FreshNetworks has meant that we’re a little later than expected  bringing you the third in our series of Online Community Examples . After looking at examples in the retail and automotive industries, this week we are looking at examples from the not-for-profit sector. There are many great example of not-for-profits using social media and it is sometimes the case that this sector can Online communities in the not-for-profit sector There are many reasons for this: the financial pressures are different, there is a real need to engage people

Talking to people from MDF , a training and consultancy firm, we had to conclude that there are few practical examples of communities of practice in a development context, so I'll try and search harder (haven't even started the whole km4dev journal for instance). I'm not sure if there are no examples, but there may not be many well-described cases of how communities of practice were intentionally nurtured and leveraged for enhanced knowledge sharing and innovation for development. One example of a community of practice is the KM4dev community and I had the honour to to talk to Lucy Lamoureux, the coordinator, somewhere last year, about the same time of the publishment of an official interview with her in the km4dev journal She describes the Km4dev community as a group of development practitioners working in knowledge management and knowledge sharing who ask for advice and receive quick responses from peers.

Lets take a look at some possible roles in learning communities or communities of practice. These are examples, and they are in my language. Here are some examples. Tutor  - tutors help learners achieve the course objectives and support the individual’s learning objectives and practices. Community Leadership in Learning - bees, mentors, coaches, experts and friends  This is the sixth  in a series of blog posts I wrote for  Darren Sidnick .

The e-collaboration community of practice, a group of people working for development organisations in the Netherlands (which started a blog on its domain here) is almost one year old and the 'facilitators' decided to ask an external person, John Smith , to look back and help to design the next steps. In general, I had been hesitant to use the name community of practice for the group too, because in a way even after a full year, it feels we are just at the beginning. I co-facilitate the group of behalf of IICD with Sibrenne Wagenaar from PSO .