A Community of Practice (CoP) is a group of professionals who aim to identify
Best Practices and share their knowledge to improve their professional activities.
Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder (p. 76) describe four kinds of CoP with different strategic intents.
Helping Communities
Best-practice Communities
Knowledge-stewarding Communities
Innovation Communities
A group of professionals, informally bound to one another through exposure to a common class of problems, common pursuit of solutions, and thereby themselves embodying a store of knowledge.
McKinsey & Co.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 an 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.
U. ColoradoReferences:
Martin White on CoPs
James Robertson on an intranet CoP
Cultivating Communities of Practice, by E. Wenger, R. McDermott, and W. Snyder
A CoP on CoPs