ABSTRACT
According to Wenger et al., communities of practice are like “gardens” that “benefit from cultivation”. They proposed that “even though communities [of practice] are voluntary and organic, good community design can invite, even evoke, aliveness”. Communities of practice are dynamic social structures that require “cultivation” so that they can emerge and grow. This chapter traces cultivation of community of practice utilizing our proposed social knowledge management framework. Defined as a group of people who share a common practice, the chapter bears reference as to how cultivation of community of practice can effectively pave the path for a collaborative learning environment, where each communitarian member or practitioner has the opportunity to democratically contribute in knowledge transaction. The chapter begins by providing a conceptual framework of community of practice. Collaborative learning spaces, intrinsic to community of practice, have been a historical phenomenon, enabling informal education in early societies. Providing a glimpse of its past, the chapter proceeds to analyse the effectivity of community of practice since its formal inception. The role it plays in boosting organizational and subsequently social performance marks the effectivity of the concept in the context of mitigation of knowledge asymmetry of rural producers by facilitating shared practice-oriented knowledge exchange between both rural and urban agents.
