Welcome to the Web's first site dedicated to communities of practice, since 1995!

If this is your first visit and just want to get a sense of what communities of practice are about, enjoy browsing our Resources. If you're a community leader, facilitator or executive who supports communities of practice, we recommend the announcement below.

International executive workshop lead by Etienne Wenger and George Pór at the London School of Economics, May 4 - 5, 2004.

If you are a community leader or facilitator in the private or the public sector, or an executive who supports communities of practice, knowledge networks, and other forms of self-organizing engines of value-creation, then you may have already asked the two inter-related questions below, as many of you that we talked with recently:

• If our communities are to grow, evolve and reach their full potential, then their strategic value has to be acknowledged and appreciated. To get there, first, the value of community-enabled strategic results has to be proved, without sacrificing the grassroots, self-organizing nature of the communities. How can we do that?

• What makes communities hotbeds of innovation and co-creativity, and how their energy can be aligned with the strategic intent of the organization hosting them?

The workshop faculty may bring a couple of fresh perspectives and methods for working with them-related to the points above-but it is the participants' driving questions that will guide the workshop's learning agenda.

For information about the faculty, look up the official workshop announcement.

To participate in the blog conversation about the focus of the workshop, go to the blog on Value-creation by Communities of Practice.

Here are some ideas about why organizations should pay attention to their communities of practice.

We, at CoIL, look at workplace communites, in general, and CoPs, in particular, as crucibles of collective intelligence. We are dedicated to provide them with the most powerful enabling infrastructures we can. Community Intelligence Labs' work with corporate communities of practice was quoted in Fortune magazine (Aug. 5, 1996).

The Community Intelligence Labs crew offers community practitioners these webpages as a meeting place, in which we can accelerate the spread of best practices and share points of view on tough issues.