Our idea of communities of practice is centered around collaboration. It’s about making it easier for all of us who are involved in development to find our way around the masses of information available–and much that’s not yet available. It’s about sharing information, finding solutions--at all levels, and talking to each other. And most of all it’s about working together to empower communities and improve the lives of those suffering.

To complement and leverage our existing efforts, we would like to start a collaborative initiative which includes governmental and inter-governmental organizations, members of the public and private sectors, civil society groups and individuals.

Our Communities of Practice will be based on the www.wesouthasians.org website. It will deal with various issues that matter to us. Users will be able to access information, resources, and tools, and also contribute their own knowledge and experience. The Cop will create a common platform for shared material, dialogue, and problem-solving that is easy to access and navigate through. This will enable those in the field to share information, easily communicate, and build communities of practice around significant challenges from the grassroots up.

The term ‘Communities of practice’ was originally coined to study the way people naturally work and play together (Wenger, 1998; Brown, 1995). It was noticed that when people take on complex tasks, they require conversation, experimentation and shared experiences with other people who do what they do (Brown, 1995; Allee, 2000). It was also noticed that these people were not just exchanging ideas, but jointly developing new and better practices (Brown, 1995). In this way, it is possible to view the collective knowledge as a series of interconnected practices (Wenger, 1996). As Lesser & Prusak (1999) describe, behind every organization chart lie informal clusters and networks of employees who work together – sharing knowledge, solving common problems and exchanging insights, stories and frustrations.

Communities of practice are defined as groups of people who:

• Continually interact,
• Share goals and interests,
• Emphasize knowledge exchange and development,
• Employ common practices in pursuit of these,
• Develop similar beliefs and values.
  (Mitchell, 2002; Allee, 2000)

Communities of practice are grass roots, self-organising and develop around things that matter to people. Membership emerges in the process of activity, rather than being created to carry out a task. They may start around a process. The boundaries of communities of practice are flexible and can transcend geographic and organizational boundaries. In some cases, communities of practice are necessarily multidisciplinary and ‘virtual’ (Wesley, 2001; Wenger, 1998; Mitchell, 2002). Your community of practice includes the people with whom you can discuss the latest developments in the field and troubleshoot each other’s challenges (Wenger, 1998). These people may not necessarily work directly with you. Sometimes, your real colleagues work on different projects, or in different organizations (Wenger, 1998).

This is clearly the case in the hepatitis C sector, which is why the concept of ‘communities of practice’ is so useful in analysing ‘HepLink’, a network of hepatitis C workers.

Initially established in 1991 as a support group for workers, HepLink grew into a network which shares information and resources, provides learning opportunities and fosters collaboration. The interagency currently has over 150 members, and active email ‘listerv’ which serves as an information exchange and contact point for members.

Basic Elements
The communities of practice concept was pioneered by the Institute for Research on Learning, a spin-off of the Xerox Corporation in Paulo Alto, CA. The Institute pursues a cross-disciplinary approach to learning research, involving cognitive scientists, organizational anthropologists, and traditional educators. Communities of practice is based on the following assumptions:

Learning is fundamentally a social phenomenon. People organize their learning around the social communities to which they belong. Therefore, schools are only powerful learning environments for students whose social communities coincide with that school.

Knowledge is integrated in the life of communities that share values, beliefs, languages, and ways of doing things. These are called communities of practice. Real knowledge is integrated in the doing, social relations, and expertise of these communities.

The processes of learning and membership in a community of practice are inseparable. Because learning is interwined with community membership, it is what lets us belong to and adjust our status in the group. As we change our learning, our identity–our relationship to the group changes.

Knowledge is inseparable from practice. It is not possible to know without doing. By doing, we learn.

Empowerment–or the ability to contribute to a community–creates the potential for learning. Circumstances in which we engage in real action that has consequences for both us and our community create the most powerful learning environments.