ABSTRACT
According to Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger,1 a community of practice is a group of people who share an interest, a draft, or a profession. It is a group that evolves naturally because of the members’ common interest in a particular domain, or it can be created specifically with the goal of gaining knowledge related to their field. It is through the process of sharing knowledge and experiences with the group that the members learn from each other, construct a common practice, and build tight bonds of community.2,3
Communities of practice play a well-recognized and well-documented role in the creation, exchange, mobilization, and capture of knowledge. John Seely Brown4 was among the first to document the existence of informal communities of practice and to describe the value of these communities to organizational knowledge management. Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder5 discussed community components and life cycles and suggested ways that community members can facilitate the development of communities of practice. Saint Onge6 further discussed the role that organizations can play in supporting structured or more formal organizational communities of practice. The literature is rich with case studies of communities of practice in a wide range of subject domains and economic sectors, including military services,7-9 national intelligence, diplomatic service, disaster response,10-13 health care,14-23 wilderness medicine,24 technology support, software development, education,25-29 and many others. Some research has begun to focus
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on the role of communities of practice beyond formal organizations and formal business roles, for example in craft and hobby environments,30-32 community writing centers,33 and online gaming communities.34
