By Tom Braford
In classical Greece, “corporations” of metal workers, potters, masons and other craftsmen trained apprentices and spread innovations. In the Middle Ages, guilds played similar roles. Today’s version of Communities of Practice is different and continues to evolve in several fundamental ways.
Instead of working on their own in isolation, today’s Communities of Practice most typically operate within large organizations that take a multi-team approach to innovation. Ironically, they are discovering that generating knowledge often happens best in informal, less structured settings. As a result, high functioning Communities of Practice are constantly renewed both as the golden eggs and as the goose that lays them.
Community developers like Irresistible Community Builders, LLC cannot mandate Communities of Practice. Our job is to bring the right people together and create an infrastructure within which communities can thrive. As the scientific method would have it, the more highly formal and managed large corporate, university and government innovation research-minded organizations now find it productive to partner with community grassroots projects, like our prototype Arizmendi Ecovillage.
As a result, there seems to be a flurry of funding opportunity announcements aimed at encouraging these kinds of collaborations. Recently, we were able to form diverse teams that include people with interest in both formal innovation research and social community building to participate in two solar innovation grant applications.
We are now working on other applications that include both the hard and the soft sciences. One of our innovations we are proposing is to establish and test optimally designed and scaled live-in/work-in citizen science oriented Communities of Practice.
If you think you might be interested in being involved in such a community as an experimenter or a researcher or both, please let us know at your earliest convenience so we can include you in future innovation communities of practice teams and community based funding applications.
If you are not interested in science, just think of this as the longest, most expensive and most fulfilling personal growth workshop that you will ever participate in.
Contact: braford@sbcglobal.net
www.ArizmendiEcovillage.com