This page contains links to talks, podcasts, books and accademic papers about communities of practice. Inspired by Lorin's reading lists e.g. Messiness reading list
Communities are fun, amazing, very powerful and are not obvious or easy to understand. These resources can help you with that.
Communities of Practice, the Missing Piece of Your Agile Organisation by Emily Webber.
For more checout the insightful Building Successful Communities of Practice book also by Emily. This is specifically for creating Communities of Practice in the workplace.
If you need a courage boost, something to help you get started in the first place, checkout Tribes by Set Godin.
Learn from expert community builders like:
Focuses on connecting people, bringing out peoples gifts and assets instead of focusing on deficiencies. https://www.nurturedevelopment.org/asset-based-community-development/
Building Successful Communities of Practice by Emily Webber
Situated Learning the original book by Wenger and Lave where CoPs first came up. A must-read.
Get Together: How to build a community with your people by Stripe Press. Learn from many different stories of various community builders, not specifically for the workplace but lots of inspiration.
Asset-Based Community Development: An Incomplete Guide (stil on my reading list)
Where Good Ideas Come From not specifically about communities, but you get some ideas of the magic that can happen in communities. Get some different ways to think about CoPs like liquid networks, serendipitous discoveries from from shared spaces like MIT’s building 20 and Microsoft’s building 99.
Communities of Practice, the Missing Piece of Your Agile Organisation by Emily Webber
The Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming by Jessica Kerr. Get a better idea on the magic that can happen in communities. Learn about London Coffeehouse, Florentine Camerata and Symmathesy (contextual mutual learning through interaction) an idea by Nora Bateson.
Communities of practice and social learning systems: the career of a concept by Etienne Wenger
The Strength of Weak Ties by Mark S. Granovetter + Strong and Weak Ties learn about the power of weak ties and why we need them. Diversity, access to different information, skills, relationships and perspectives. Reaching harder and more distant parts of the network.
The Seven Habits of Highly Connected People” Hindsight Magazine (32) by Cormac Russell
Evolution of Wenger's concept of community of practice
Structural and Epistemic Parameters in Communities of Practice talks about how organisations can support CoPs without constraining them by controlling them in a way that disrupts the dynamics that make the community work in the first place. It differentiates between different structures and the delicate balance between seeding structures and controlling structures. A few teasers:
- CoPs need seeding structure to grow
- Summarises some of the original material from Wenger of what is a CoP and how do you know one has formed.
- importance of artifacts as points of focus for people to identify and interact
- incentives and how they changed over time with a change of the structure
- danger of becoming too introspective losing touch with the wider organisation context
The fractal structure of communities of practice: Implications for business organization by Emily Webber and Robin Dunbar. What size community can benefit from a leadership team structure?
Collaborative Processes and Knowledge Creation in Communities-of-Practice (paywall)
Making Tech Better podcast episode Communities of Practice, with Emily Webber