A CommunityOfPractice is a group of people who are in some sense defined by their task. Here's one definition [1]:

	 :	Community of Practice: A group of practitioners involved in a common activity, albeit performing different roles. Essential characteristics of communities of practice are: 1) they are not defined by organizational mandate (e.g., the "org chart"), but rather by the ways people actually work together, 2) they involve many different "roles", as opposed to a flat structure, and 3) they experience a ongoing flux of community members, who enter the community from the periphery and gain status as knowledgeable members through participation in the community of practice.

Here's another [2], from a page devoted to the topic.

	 :	A Community of Practice (COP) is a special type of informal network that emerges from a desire to work more effectively or to understand work more deeply among members of a particular specialty or work group. At the simplest level, CoPs are small groups of people who've worked together over a period of time and through extensive communication have developed a common sense of purpose and a desire to share work-related knowledge and experience.

Here's a final one, from a book on LegitimatePeripheralParticipation:

	 :	A community of practice is a set of relations among persons, activity, and world, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping communities of practice. A community of practice is an intrinsic condition for the existence of knowledge...

In my so-far cursory reading, some additional features stick out:

	* Personal identity is bound up with the task that defines the community. For example, someone might refer to himself as a "hacker" (in either the old sense of compulsive programmer or in the new sense of security cracker) or a "Smalltalk programmer". Despite the emphasis on the verb (what one does), this statement also implies a great deal about what one '''is'''. 

	* Learning is done by telling stories to each other and by performing ever-more-central tasks. This is called LegitimatePeripheralParticipation.

	* "Learning, from this point of view, is not simply a matter of acquiring information; it requires developing the disposition, demeanor, and outlook of the practitioners." -- John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. That's why saying "I'm a hacker" is a statement that usually says much more than "I program a lot". 

	* Reputation plays a central role. In the crudest terms, there are "masters" and "apprentices". A person's life within the community tends to be "centripetal" - it is important to move closer to mastery of the task.

Some references:

''Communities Of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity'', by Etienne Wenger.

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0521663636.01._PE_PI_SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg
[ISBN 0521663636]

''Organizational Learning and Communities of Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning, and Innovation'', by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, 

''Organization Science'' (Vol.2, No. 1, pp. 40-57), February 1991, 

Is a fairly famous article describing how Xerox copier repair people learn: much more by telling war stories in the break room than from the repair manuals and training courses. 

''The Social Life of Information'', by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid 

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0875847625.01._PE_PI_SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg
[ISBN 0875847625] is new in 02000. 

-- BrianMarick
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CategoryBook