Community of Practice

Community of Practice

• Description: Support groups of individuals with similar work responsibilities but who are not part of a formally designated work team. Many communities of practice communicate through a web-based system. For more information have a look at ewenger.com

• Other definitions: Search the web

• Examples for applications of COP's in forest management: A COP on Forest Policy - Forest Practice ; Community of Practice on Forest Financing in Latin America; eForest (US forest planners) ;
• Examples for applications of COP's in natural resource management: www.e-agriculture.org - people exchange information, ideas, and resources related to the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) for sustainable agriculture and rural development; aims.fao.org - CoP for accessing and discussing agricultural information management standards, tools and methodologies]; EcosystemCommons (ecosystem services) ;iemHUB (development, evaluation, and application of environmental models) ;Ecosystem-Based Management Tools Network (marine); Redlands Institute Spatial Decision Support Knowledgebase

• Examples for tools to develop COP's:
  • phpWebSite provides a complete web site content management system for easy maintenance of interactive, community-driven web sites;
  • eForest (US forest planners) uses the commercial web service Ning
  • iemHUB (environmental models) uses the open source [HUBzero] platform