Communities of Practice PART 4 February 21, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : learning, internet, Art , trackbackAnother example which is barely a community but I’d like to mention because of the speed at which it came together. I think the rapid formation can be attributable to the social photograph hosting service at Flickr.com, which has been built especially to enable social interaction and is attracting a growing core of active users. So maybe it’s the use of graphical images as the basis for building relationships, maybe it’s the functionality of flickr or maybe it was just a good idea, facilitated at the right time.
The group, “scanned objects”is for people who use scanners, not to scan photos or documents, but scanning objects mostly for the purpose of making art. This idea gathered 20 people together who were each doing something similar on their own, to form a proto-community in no time at all, just through the power of images, tags, and a minor recruitment campaign over just a week or so. Since January the group has grown to 32 members with 111 images in the group pool.
Measured against Wenger’s criteria, the group has a shared domain of interest - Art, Technology, Imaging.
it has a shared practice - using digital scanners to create unique art from found objects.
it has an embryonic community - Artists remain subscribed to the group, view each others’ work, and are influenced by what they see and the comments left attached to the images. There is some discussion as to which scanners are best, the use of backgrounds, problems of condensation when scanning seafood!
So the community would appear to fit or at least begin to fit the criteria according to Wenger and yet I would be very reluctant to describe this as a COP. Why?
Brainstorming now…..
It isn’t a COP because
[Quantitative reasons]
There aren’t enough members yet - 32
There isn’t enough conversation yet - words or pictures?
There isn’t enough practice yet - merely a trivial sideline for most.
[Qualitative reasons]
The members are mainly hobbyists rather than professionals.
[Other]
Calling this a COP devalues the meaning of COP.
There’s something wrong with Wenger’s criteria.
The investment required to join and to remain a member is trivial. It’s too easy.
There’s something about the way the group rapidly emerged into being which reminds me of other sub-communities within larger online environments.
The group homepages on H2G2 for instance, some of the subcommunities within Ultraversity, the JellyARTclub on JellyOS. Web bulletin boards and newsgroups which were created in a fit of enthusiasm by a handful of people, or even one individual. 
The thing that seems to drive them at first is a sense of group identity. Some people, perhaps all of us, just feel the need to to belong to something. So we come across something which interests us, note the apparant energy of one or two instigators and we happily sign up to the club. We identify ourselves with the group by adding our name onto the group’s growing list of members, we reciprocate and reinforce by proclaiming our membership of the group on our own homepage. It’s all about identity. But then after we have done that, what is there for the group to do? In some cases absolutely nothing. The group just sits there doing nothing, proudly proclaiming it’s list of adherents. Over time, the members lose interest because there is nothing to do, the instigators get bored and go awol, passers-by try to join in but find they are talking to ghosts.
While some might call these ‘false communities of practice”, such groups do seem to serve an important purpose. at least for a while.
I call them “Communities of Identity”
“Fans” would seem to be another example. People who are fervent fans of a particular rock group, a cult TV program or a 
football team need to identify themselves with a fan community. They seek each other out through fashion, wearing badges, attending fan events and buying merchandise. Perhaps it’s an ancient tribal thing, this need to belong. To make visible the difference between our tribe and everybody else. This is what communities of identity do, and I suspect there is an element of it to be found behind the magic properties of Communities of Practice as well.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
The work of Lave and Wenger was largely based on crafts or trades from before the industrial revolution. The exception that I am aware of is a group of claims processors in an insurance firm. I have read the criticism that these contexts do not translate well to an industrial or post-industrial society and I can see some sense in this as the social contexts in which we now live and work are very different.
I think the notion of shared enterprise is very important, that is not simply being interested in or doing the same thing but having the same vested interest. I suspect this is why CoP between different schools are often less successful than is hoped.
I don’t thinks it enough to have a shared interest for a CoP to be successful. I think there needs to be a shared passion by its participants for it to develop and thrive.
I think it’s true that passion is an essential element. It needn’t be present from the start though, but develops naturally if the COP is successful, and is in turn a part of the success. I used to be in a community which discussed a rather dreary radio 4 Fly-on-the-wall documentary. Most of the members wern’t all that bothered by the radio programme but they are very passionate about the online community itself, to the extend of always offering real and tangible help to each other in all sorts of spheres. A powerful force indeed, but would fall down against Wenger’s criteria through the absence of a common practice.
Maybe the participants had something deeper in common, perhaps in their personalities, for example - after all they were listening to the same programme in the first instance so this could in itself be an idictaor that they were like-minded people. The community was the medium that allowed them to identify other areas and similarities in themselves and the community changed to became more of a social meeting place. Is it not the people that make the CoP, not the practice itself?