Dave Snowden recently said to Etienne Wenger "If knowledge management had had the tools we have today it would not have needed communities of practice" (I paraphrase).

What's your take on this. I know what I think but am keen to hear others' ideas and perspectives.

If knowledge management (and management in general) wasn't so focused on tools and data then communities of practice could have been everywhere.
KM brings attention to the differences between data and knowledge, but of course a lot of knowledge can't be represented as data, since it is embedded in practice and stories. Meanings and practice are created and shared within a community context. Shared understanding can be distributed in story-form via networks of practice, i.e. social knowledge networks. Tools that support the social distribution of knowledge are not widely researched, used or understood.
Surely Dave's comment to Etienne is meant provocatively, rather than being an historically accurate observation?
Does Dave have some ideas about tool that support CoPs?

Thanks for sharing this little "nugget". Is there more context to Dave's statement? Any related written commentary to review?

It was meant as a factual statement not a provocation
Most of the tools used in CoP are over formal and over structured. You can achieve more or less all that you can achieve with technology through the unstructured associations and links that social computing provides.

A fascinating comment by Dave. I too assumed it was a little provocative. :-)

I think CoP's exist in spite of clunky tools. CoP's (in my assessment) are an observable social interaction/entiry - it's not whether they are 'needed' or not, they just are - or are not - according to the context, nurture, conditions . . .

I take Dave's point: "You can achieve more or less all that you can achieve with technology through the unstructured associations and links that social computing provides." - but I think what you achieve is CoP like activity and functioning - in other words as Warren says: "communities of practice could have been everywhere. "

With quality (social) tools and not clunky locked down stuff: CoPs could flow and grow all over the place.

Exactly: "unstructured associations," and the "links that social computing provides", they're closer to CoPs than they are to KM.
I'd expect Wenger to know about research that shows how ideas such as unstructured associations should be considered by those who support and fund the implementation of so called 'knowledge management' systems.
It must be provocative to suggest that relevant research hasn't been published, or at least brought to Wenger's attention?
(Perhaps Roberta Cuel would like to comment on the semantics relations narrative, and language within communities?)

I interpret COP as observable social phenomena like Derek, so the question about 'needing' them is moot. What concerns me is that in the distributed technology enabled world we can now make deliberate choices as to how transparent the ties and communications are.

Is Dave perhaps hinting that organisations can now reap the same informational benefits from a semi-transparent network of individual communications and temporary nodes that before required a fully open many-to-many community with a formally subscribed membership?

I think ( or at least hope ) that the real practice based communities will find ways to protect themselves from being undermined by person-centric networks with their secret backchannels and disenfranchising power curves.

Hi, great issue to explore!

I think I'm on the same line as Derek and Andy with CoP as a social phenomena. It's about the way people learn in practice. The interesting question raised by Dave Snowden has, in my opinion, more to do with what changes in this social phenomena because of the new tools and technologies and ways of connecting and exchanging information that's offered by these technologies. I do believe there are changes, as I do believe we all use the CoP theory in our own ways. I used it in my efforts to facilitate a learning community.

But how much use does the theory have in online communities (of now, and especially in the future? I do believe that with a new mindset of open exchange of collaboration and openess in sharing what you are doing, the aspect of belonging may become less important, but I'm not sure. People may not need a certain level of trust before they share ideas and information in an online forum. Moving in and out of communities of practice may also increase velocity as people do not have a life long practice, but may change with changing jobs, interests etc.. Miguel Cornejo wrote a paper about this too by the way, esploring similar issues. (I remember I didn't agree with all his ideas, and thought he was writing from a knowledge board experience.

http://www.knowledgeboard.com/cgi-bin/library.cgi?action=list&qryzonecs=1&qrycategory_cs=93&qryname=fishermen&qrydescription=&search=Search

Joitske

Aside comment.
We are creating a new website to support our activities, and as a consequence are struggling with some issues around collaboration support, PR for our centre, platform, open source, inclusion, identity and personal preferences.
I have just re-read a Tim O'Reilly report from 2004/55 "Open Source paradigm Shift". A fascinating story.

He says:

"It appears that open source is the "natural language" of a networked community. Given enough developers and a network to connect them, open-source-style development behavior emerges"
http://tim.oreilly.com/articles/paradigmshift_0504.html

my take: given connections and people OS behaviour emerges (ie community behaviour).

Hi Bronwyn, We don't know what you think, so what do you think about it yourself?

I really think communities are not about technology. The technology can be an enabler and I have studied some communities where the technology was a total barrier. I have always been a fan of appropriate technology and I think we are seeing tools emerge that are variously appropriate for KM and CoPs. Cop for me is not a thing but an ethos, a culture - a way of behaving and being responsible for more than your own learning. It pervades many aspects of what I do - online and offline. So while I do think some tools will help people take responsibility for each others learning and to build community I don't think it is necessarily the critical issue.

Take FACEBOOK - while many of us network, join groups and hook up - how much is it really about community for the majority? Even the SNA tools put the profile member in the middle of the network. This space is about linking individuals - well at least how it seems for me right now.

Oh crap, I replied somehow to Bronwyn alone. (not loving FB but feeling slightly coerced, or not wanting to miss out on conversations. ha!)

I wrote something which is reflected in the flow...

"I think the context here matters. I SUSPECT (I don't know) that Dave is talking about the sort of fadish focus on CoPs and CoP software, rather than the intrinsic value of learning from and with each other."

Sorry for the late answer. I have been having Internet connection problems lately ...

I would say that it is the people and not the tools that make up the community and that also keep it going. The tools are only there as an alternative means to support the conversation, the sharing, the joint construction of ideas, and eventually communal knowledge. Look at facebook, for instance. It is far from being a perfect tool. Still, it is being used in a very effective way. Why is this? It is the people, and the way people are using it. And if it wasn’t for the people that have adopted facebook as a “gathering place”, where they can connect to others, it would have never been regarded as a wonderful tool.
In short, I think that CoP are focused on the individual(s) and on how they interact with each other and form learning/social/friendship bonds around certain topics and/or areas of interest. Individuals link to each other because they have a purpose, an interest, a willing of sharing and build on what they already know or even acquired new lines of thought. The technology came to help narrow the links of communication between people, but is sure didn’t come to replace them. In my opinion CoP are essentially formed by people that come together for a reason. And that is learning with and from others within a certain context.
But I also agree that the more informal the community is, the more effective the learning environment becomes.

Hi Bronwyn (we met at Web-based Communities conference a few years ago - remember the sedition;-) )
Anyway back to this interesting thread. IMHO, Facebook is a complex and very flexible social network / set of tools. This complexity can be a problem for users - all those decisions about privacy/ publicness. Anyway a consequence of this is that it can be used as a person-centric network and a 'community' of practice or otherwise.
For example, we are setting up an online network for a face to face women's network at my place of work. We discussed how people could be in the group but not share their slightly edgy network of friends' behaviours with work colleagues. We came up with the idea of having a closed group for the work network (where members could message each other and participate in discussions like this but private from passers by) but only using friend option for people who we would have friended anyway. In my case, that would be anyone I knew but for others it would be a closer group of friends.
I'll post about visualisation in the other thread.

Nancy is pretty close. I would certainly argue that CoP application software packages have been a complete waste of time and damage real communities. Social computing offers more capability. Hence my general view that we could have done with today's technology ten years so.

I would also (to take the issue on) argue that attempts to create CoP through formal process and control are also a mistake. If a community has value it will form and the technology now allows that. Control and censorship are not appropriate. You might need that in a formal document repository or lessons learnt database (where a degree of validity is required) and those might link to communities. But the idea of a formally controlled and structured environment is I think (and thankfully) at an end.