Author	Title	Date of Addition
Richard McDermott	Knowing in Community: 10 Critical Success Factors in Building Communities of Practice Many companies are discovering that the real gold in knowledge management is not in distributing documents or combining databases. This paper outlines the key challenges and solutions to start and support communities capable of sharing tacit knowledge and thinking together.	2/28/00
Richard McDermott	Nurturing Three Dimensional Communities of Practice: How to get the most out of human networks There are many different kinds of communities of practice. Some develop "official" best practices, some create guidelines, some have large knowledge repositories, others simple meet to discuss common problems and solutions. Communities also connect in many different ways. Some meet face to face, others have conferences; others share ideas through a website. To decide what kind of community and what kind of connection is best for your organization you need to understand three dimensions: what kind of knowledge people need to share; how tightly bonded the community is; and how closely new knowledge needs to be linked with people's everyday work.	1/7/00
Richard McDermott	Learning Across Teams: The Role of Communities of Practice in Team Organizations Many companies today are moving to a new organizational model in which cross-functional teams are the key building block of the organization. While cross-functional teams are great vehicles for producing products and services, they have some key limitations. Cross-functional teams can become insulated from each other, focusing on team goals and reinventing ideas and analyses from other teams. The "double-knit" organization links cross-functional teams together through communities of practice and enables teams to systematically learn from each other.	1/7/00
William M. Snyder	Organization and world design: The Gaia's Hypotheses This case-study analysis explores how community-based organizing approaches can enable firms to align ecological, social, and financial objectives.	2/2/99
William M. Snyder	Communities of Practice: Combining Organizational Learning and Strategy Insights to Create a Bridge to the 21st Century This paper outlines the rationale for a competence-based view of organizations and proposes a community-of-practice approach to address a number of important business challenges: mergers and acquisitions, leveraging and stretching competence across functions and SBUs, accelerating innovation, business-unit disaggregation, and outsourcing.	1/30/99
Patricia B. Seybold	Communities of Practice - A Critical Success Factor for Information Age Businesses	7/24/98
Michael McMaster	Communities of Practice: an Introduction Formal corporate structures may be good for allocating resources, making large decisions and aligning accountabilities but they are insufficient to the development, application and spread of knowledge. The informal nature of communities is much more conducive to learning, continually increasing mastery and development of new knowledge.	4/28/98
Etienne Wenger	Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity Cambridge University Press, 1997 Excerpt: . . . Communities of practice are an integral part of our daily lives. They are so informal and so pervasive that they rarely come into explicit focus, but for the same reasons, they are also quite familiar. While the term may be new, the experience is not. Most communities of practice do not have a name or issue membership cards.	4/28/98
	Community Building: Renewing Spirit and Learning in Business is an incredible collection of essays; forty-three authors offer their unique contributions to reestablishing community in our modern organizations New Leaders Press, 1995	4/28/98
Etienne Wenger	How to Optimize Organizational Learning Excerpts: Treat Communities of practice as assets. Encouraging learning communities by supporting reflection processes and access to information as part of the practice itself. Given the right conditions - enough understanding of circumstances, access to resources and control over their destiny - communities of practice can use their shared history as a social resource to learn very much, very fast. Encourage the formation and deepening of communities of practice by legitimizing the work of pulling them together and valuing the informal learning they facilitate. If staff nurses come up with an idea for improving patient care over lunch, then take that idea to their supervisor, and are met with a response like, "Well, write up a proposal and the appropriate committee will review it," or "That's an idea that should come through the Committee for the Enhancement of Patient Care," will those nurses be motivated to generate new learning and new ideas in the future? Full text	4/28/98
David Krackhardt & Jeffrey Hanson	Informal Networks: The Company Behind the Chart Harvard Business Review, July-August, 1993 "...much of the real work of companies happens despite the formal organization. Often what needs attention is the informal organization, the networks of relationships that employees form across functions and divisions to accomplish tasks fast." "If the formal organization is the skeleton of a company, the informal is the central nervous system driving the collective thought processes, actions, and reactions of it business units. Designed to facilitate standard modes of production, the formal organization is set up to handle easily anticipated problems. But when unexpected problems arise, the informal organization kicks in."	4/28/98
Thomas A. Stewart	"The Invisible Key to Success" Fortune Magazine , August 5, 1996	4/28/98
John Sharp	Key Hypotheses in Supporting Communities of Practice	4/28/98
Jean Lave & Etienne Wenger	"Legitimate Peripheral Participation in Communities of Practice" a chapter in "Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation" Cambridge University Press (1991). Jean Lave Etienne Wenger	4/28/98
John Seely Brown & Estee Solomon Gray	The People Are the Company The story begins in the 1980s. We were looking for ways to boost the productivity of the Xerox field service staff. Before deciding how to proceed, we launched a study. An anthropologist from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a member of the work-practices team, traveled with a group of tech reps to observe how they actually did their jobs - not how they described what they did, or what their managers assumed they did. That research challenged the way Xerox thought about the nature of work, the role of the individual, and the relationship between the individual and the company. It was the first shot in a revolution.	4/28/98
John Seely Brown	"Research That Reinvents the Corporation" Harvard Business Review, Jan.-Feb., 1991 John Seely Brown	4/28/98