Communities of Practice and Communities -- related? Of course. But before moving on to describe the relationship there needs to be some understanding or better still agreement about what is meant by Community of Practice and Community itself.

As your extract highlights, communities existed long before the advent the Internet so the term has been, depending on your viewpoint, usurped or adopted by cybernauts to fit with virtual scenarios. Similarly, communities of practice have long since existed but they were typically co-located whereas today and they are interconnected via the Internet but are ever less likely to be co-located. There is a lot of hype and also rhetoric surrounding the potential benefits of Communities of Practice -- I have written a session called Cops and Robbers playing on the acronyms but also highlighting the challenges faced by the users in that some are loquacious/frequent posters while others are more reserved/lurkers. Indeed the language that has evolved to describe various partners or players within communities of practice reveal much about how they are perceived.

A Community of Practice is centred around a common interest perhaps even a common practice. However, communities of practice need regular and varied input coupled with critical review to remain active and mutually beneficial. No intrinsic benefit = prepare for the wake! Consequently, CoPs are constantly evolving since they are dynamic rather than static. The ones that last the longest tend to be largely self organising. Indeed, there is almost a paradox in that trying to organise a community of practice becomes self-defeating since members choose whether they want to participate or not. That said, it is possible to provide situations in which communities of practice are more likely to thrive than others.

I sense that a Community of Practice is a label that members would never use to describe their activities in terms of sharing ideas and providing feedback to one another. Instead, it is more likely to be a descriptive term used by others when trying to analyse or make sense of activities that are occurring in what they perceive to be a Community of Practice. A formal community of practice is an oxymoron since it eliminates the complete freedom of choice about participation if there is some level of organisational control however loose that may be. They should be no defined agenda but one that evolves through discussion, lateral thinking and free exchange of ideas. And communities of practice that are based over the Internet will have slightly different rules of engagement from those organised on a face-to-face basis. Arguably, people who regularly meets a coffee or a quick beer to shoot the breeze and all the while exchange ideas are communities of practice yet paradoxically such a formal description is the antithesis of the informal nature of such groups.

Therefore do what comes naturally and don't worry about the terms of people ascribe to them. Such terms are really only tools of analysis used by outside observers. Of course, those concerned with organisational development will be interested to learn how they can foster an environment in which communities of practice will thrive. But here's the rub -- are communities of formal, structured components of an organisation or a reaction, possibly a slightly subversive one, to organisational strictures?

David