EPSO Building and Developing a Community of Practice Build Knowledge Develop Expertise Solve Problems Dr David Stewart 24 May 2011

What is a Community of Practice?  Communities of Practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. Etienne Wenger

The 3 Fundamental Elements of a Community of Practice  Domain – a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people  Community – they build relationships that enable them to learn from each other  Practice – they develop a shared repertoire of resources including experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems

Building more effective Communities of Practice

Communities of Practice: Orientation

 Meetings – in person or online gatherings with an agenda (i.e. monthly topic calls)  Projects – interrelated tasks with specific outcomes or products (i.e. identifying a new practice and refining it.)  Access to expertise – learning from experienced practitioners (i.e. access to subject matter experts)  Relationship – getting to know each other (i.e. the bi-annual conference)  Context – private, internally- focused or serving an organisation, or the wider world (i.e. what is kept within the community, what is shared with the wider world)  Community cultivation – Recruiting, orienting and supporting members, growing the community (i.e. who makes sure the new person is invited in and met others?)  Individual participation – enabling members to craft their own experience of the community (i.e. access material when and how you want it.)  Content – a focus on capturing and publishing what the community learns and knows (i.e. a newsletter, publishing an article, etc.)  Open ended conversation – conversations that continue to rise and fall over time without a specific goal (i.e. Web forum, Twitter, etc.) Base material from: Digital Habitats: Stewarding technology for communities © 2009 Wenger, White, and Smith Community Orientations What do they mean?

 Identify where our community is now to assess how we can facilitate our efforts to  Generate ideas and focus on activities to increase engagement  Identify tools and processes which will help us increase our shared learning  Identify how the members of the EPSO community would like to build our community to help forward planning How can EPSO use Communities of Practice concepts and ideas?

Creating an orientation profile Using CoP theory to understand your community by creating an orientation profile  Perception of the current state of the community  Perception of the desired state of the community 0 = not important 5 = very important

Proposed next steps Identify a project team to agree a COP questionnaire to build an EPSO profile RQIA will issue to all members for completion by end of August ? on-line. Draft report to be developed and agreed with project team in September/October Results presented in Belfast in November at a workshop session to agree next steps

Belfast välkomnar de EPSO Samfunnet av Praksis i November 2011 !