Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier (2000)

I had a lot of success early on with a community of practice I started inside an engineering org but as time went on it morphed into a something different: A place to assign work outside an engineers day to day. I suppose thats a function of growth - people must always be working on something.

I started it with the intention of communicating architecture changes from consensus borne out of our weekly meeting. We got TypeScript into the codebase, React Query, talked about React Context and minimizing Redux. It was fun for a while. But then, was just another meeting where work was dolled out.

tl;dr Wenger and Snyder's Harvard Business Review article about 'Communities of Practice'. These are semi-formal collaborations of peers that the authors felt were distinct from project teams, work groups, and informal networks. They felt that guilds and business councils are good analogs, but they can be more focused when composed of people from within a single (corporate) organization. The format is usually self directed, whether a gathering for expressly demonstrating industry knowledge [0] or a grievence session where members might collaborate on each other's issues [1]. Wenger and Snyder noted different organizational support for these communities, like American Management Systems using membership as an overt reward and requiring a project to qualify. The authors, however, suggest that the sponsoring organization should take systemmatic polls or interviews about the effectiveness of the practice, to avoid overestimating based on one or two reviews, or letting it become a rest session.

[0] https://blog.hubspot.com/service/lunch-and-learn

[1] https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/cros...

This seems like, when formally provided time for members, an organization inculcating such a movement overtly tries to fulfill the upper parts of Maslow's Hierarchy. I think that such an effort fits under the same budget as allowing self-directed study time during work hours.