OFFICIAL COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE (CoP) ROLES

Communities of Practice require a number of key roles to be filled. These need not necessarily be a single individual working full time. They are revolving roles much like everyone taking turn at being a scribe at business meetings.

Champion: The Champion ensures support at the highest level, communicates the purpose, promotes the community and insures impact.

Sponsor: The Sponsor serves as a bridge between the CoP and the rest of the organization, communicates the organization’s support for a CoP, and may remove barriers. The Sponsor is instrumental in establishing the mission and the expected outcomes for the community. Community members are recruited for their expertise relevant to the practice or strategic services. There are there to better share knowledge, know-how and best practices that will benefit their company through active participation. They participate in discussions, raise issues and concerns regarding common needs and requirements, alert other members to any changes in conditions and requirements, are on the look-out for ways to enhance CoP effectiveness (eg. by recruiting high value members ) and above all they learn.

Facilitators: The role of the Facilitator is the most demanding role. They are responsible for clarifying communications and making sure that everyone participates and that dissident views are heard and understood. They are the chief organizers of events such as meetings (face to face as well as virtual meetings). They administrate all communications by drawing out reticent members, reconciling opposing points of view, posing questions to further discussions and keeping discussions on topic.

Practice Leader: The Practice Leader is the acknowledged leader of the CoP theme. The leader provides thought leadership for the practice or strategic service, validates innovations and best practices and promotes adherence to them. He or she identifies emerging patterns and trends in CoP activities and knowledge base as well as in other areas that may impact the practice.  Leaders resolve conflicts, evaluate performance with respect to expectations, approve memberships and lead the way in prioritizing issues and improvements to be tackled. CoP Practice Leaders serve as a models to coach other members, or they arrange to provide coaching, and they are always alert to the potential need for CoP changes (e.g., more members, different members, and different member compositions).

Information/Knowledge Integrators: Information/Knowledge Integrators serve to interface with all COPs to ensure clarity and lack of duplication of the information disseminated with all CoPs, inform CoP members about relevant activities elsewhere, and inform others about relevant CoP activities. The knowledge center coordinates information from CoP members to avoid duplication, redundancies, and poor quality (e.g., in postings to CoP websites and forums) and they filter knowledge and request for help.

Finally, all members of the CoP share responsibility for marketing and promoting the CoP, generating interest in it, promoting enthusiasm among current members, and demonstrating its value. Everyone must ensure continued support and resources from Sponsor (s), recruit high-potential prospective members, and invite them to special CoP events. Members are expected to better leverage the knowledge created and learning generated by the CoP, to write and publish articles or results descriptions.

In addition, some new roles arise from CoPs such as Membership Managers, Discussion Moderators, Knowledge Editors, Knowledge Librarians, Archivists, Usage Analysts and Knowledge Brokers.

Membership Manager: The Membership Manager deals with registration and ongoing membership directory.

Discussion Moderator: Much like a radio/TV show host, the Discussion Moderator serves as conversation manager who helps keep discussions focused, injects new topics and  provocative points of view when discussion lags, and seeds discussion with appropriate content. Moderators must often be critical in order to ensure value generation.

Knowledge Editor: The Knowledge Editor collects, sanitizes and synthesizes content created, and provides a value-added link for the content produced.

Knowledge Librarian: The Knowledge Librarian is the community’s taxonomist and  is responsible for organizing and managing the collection of knowledge objects generated by the community.

Knowledge Archivist: The Knowledge Archivist maintains and organizes content generated by participants over time.

Usage Analyst: The Usage Analyst studies data on participants’ behaviour within the community and makes recommendations to the Moderator

Knowledge Broker: The Knowledge Broker is someone who can join up with a number of different communities in order to identify commonalities and redundancies, creates synergy, forms alliance and feed in to organizational memory and learning (e.g. map of intellectual asses, expertise directory, Cop best practices and lessons learned).