What is a Community of Practice?

A Community of Practice is a group of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis. CoPs come together face-to-face and virtually to share and to learn from one another. They are held together by a common interest in a body of knowledge and are driven by a desire and a need to share problems, experiences, insights, tools, and best practices (Wenger, Snyder, and McDermott, 2002).

I highly recommend “Cultivating Communities of Practice” to all knowledge managers, information gatherers and officers. This book has helped me articulate and measure the value of CoPs to my organization. It also uncovered challenges CoPs face and offers solutions and comprehensive case studies as examples.

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Are you part of a community of practice? How do you choose to deepen your knowledge and expertise?

The established presence: How to maintain it, grow it and show it!

notes from GHKC Knowledge Share Fair

Today, I attended the Global Health Knowledge Collaborative Knowledge Management Share Fair. I was asked to facilitate three 15-minute small group discussions during a 60-minute afternoon concurrent session on “Measuring more than ‘likes’ and ‘follows’: Maximizing the potential of social media. Each facilitator developed their own sub-topic.  The topic I chose was titled: “The established presence: How to maintain it, grow it and show it.”

I chose this topic of discussion in response to my observation of progress individuals, organizations and projects working in global public health have made on online communication in the past five years.

In this discussion, I described one’s web presence to online real estate. The manner in which one uses websites and social media accounts can determine the size of their footprint.

What are the characteristics of an established web presence?

This is the first question I asked the discussion groups. Participants among the three 15-minute discussions agreed  consistency in the following areas are characteristics of an established web presence:

• Credible and reliable information
• Subject-matter search terms are associated with individuals/organization/project in search engine results
• Presentation of information
• Website visitor patterns
• Vision, mission and purpose

How do you maintain an established presence? 

This question consumed the majority of the discussion during all three periods. Among the three discussions, participants agreed:

• Refer to a communication strategy, which is essential
• Engage with and among users, which is key
• Foster reciprocity among community members using dynamic online communication
• Use solicited feedback from users to inform future online communication process

Due to the lively discussion, I was unable to ask follow up questions on how and why individuals/organizations/projects grow their established presence and what data is used to show establishment.

Do you have thoughts on this? If so, please share. We can continue the discussion here.

Thank you to all participants who visited my table and thank you to co-facilitators @rickimac @socialbttrfly @jzoltner and thank you to @rebecca_shore for bringing us together!