Communities of practice

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• Communities of practice
• Why bother?
• Angie Hart
• Academic Director,
• Community University Partnership Programme (Cupp)

www.cupp.org.uk
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Communities of Practice

• groups of people informally bound together by
  shared expertise and passion for a joint
  enterprise (Wenger Snyder, 2000)
• Emphasise sharing and mutuality
• No fixed boundaries between experts and
  non-experts
• Expectation that members will work across
  organisational and disciplinary boundaries
• Challenging current structures and hierarchies

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Community of Practice

• Inter disciplinary
• Cross agency
• Collaborating for mutual benefit
• Exchange of knowledge between sectors
• Boundary spanning
• Shared passion

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CoPs boundary cross

• CoPs aim to be inclusive, to make connections and
  consolidate learning across potential lines of
  division in relation to joint enterprise.
• Boundary crossing causes people to look afresh at
  their own assumptions.
• Two ways CoPs facilitate boundary crossing
• boundary objects e.g. language, artefacts
• brokering e.g. linking differing
  perspectives

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Benefits

• Clustering projects together under a shared theme
  to promote longevity and impact
• Helping different stakeholders keep up to date
  with information and skill development
• Mechanism for assessing the viability and value
  of new pieces of work or projects
• Influencing key decision makers by providing them
  with well worked and mutually owned solutions to
  shared problems 
• Explicitly working with power differentials and
  different knowledge bases 

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emergence

• Hydrogen and oxygen are the elemental gases that
  make up water, but the wetness of water is an
  emergent property of the system not reducible
  to hydrogen or oxygen (Zajonc 2010, 81).

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• The principles of emergence mean that
  over-controlling approaches will not work well
  within complex systemsthat in order to maximise
  system adaptiveness, there must be space for
  innovation and novelty to occur (Ramalingam,
  Jones et al. 2008, 21).

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My CoP membership

• Resilient practice CoP
• Pan Sussex Strategic Group for Care Leavers
• Community University Partnership Programme

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Skills useful for a CoP

• Brokerage and Convening skills
• Technical and network knowledge
• Ability to think creatively
• Ability to work with complex interpersonal
  dynamics
• Staying power
• Ability to draw upon a raft of communication
  skills at a wide variety of levels
• Passionate about making a difference in relation
  to the topic

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Community of practice issues and challenges

• Creating a win / win
• Different agendas
• Importance of boundary spanning overinvestment
  in individuals?
• Hybrid community of practice and work plan group
• Dont ask for permission, ask for forgiveness

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Bridging cultures

• Respectful of different knowledge/expertise
• Click factor
• Know what you want from partnering
• Always prepare to translate and explain
• Confidence to be vulnerable
• Prepared to be taken down a peg or two
• Explicitly elevate on the ground expertise
• Emphasise practice and relationships rather
  than organisational form or structure
  Communities of practice
• Dont get stuck with one narrative

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Further resources

• http//www.publicengagement.ac.uk/how/methods/comm
  unities-practice
• Hart, A., and D.Wolff. 2006 Developing
  communities of practice through
  community-university partnerships Planning,
  Practice and Research 21(1) 121-138
• Put communities of practice into youtube

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• Cupp news Sign up for email updates
• www.cupp.org.uk
• Community university partnerships in practice
• Edited by Angie Hart, Elizabeth Maddison and
  David Wolffwww.niace.org.uk/publications/C/comm-u
  niversity.asp
• http//www.coastalcommunities.org.uk/briefingPap
  ers.html
• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vh30hD94Nwhc

www.cupp.org.uk