Practice Groups when CPsquare was launched...

The practice groups in Wave 1 are the ones that were launched in the first phase. In Wave 2 are others we are thinking about for the near future. We invite you to consider which practice groups you are interested in joining, whether you join as an active participant, take a leadership role or even get one going.

Wave 1:

Internal/external consultants

Domain: providing coaching and advice for communities and/or running a community-based knowledge initiative
Members: support team or internal consultants, external consultants, CKO's, CLO's, corporate university or training program leaders
Issues: designing an organization-wide knowledge initiative, methods for launching new communities and developing established ones, linking communities and business processes (teams, BU's, etc.), measures, and working with executive sponsors.

Coordinators

Domain: providing leadership to cultivate vibrant communities that effectively serve members and their stakeholders
Members: community coordinators and other community leaders
Issues: starting up a new community or reviving an existing one, bringing members together, fostering a community spirit, encouraging participation, designing events for members to share knowledge or co-consult on cases and problems, dealing with community group dynamics, facilitating meetings (face-to-face and online), stewarding the practice, building a knowledge base, etc.

Technology

Domain: community-oriented technologies and their use
Members: technologists, vendors, customers, and users�who design, buy, customize, and deploy collaborative technologies, taxonomies, and knowledge bases
Issues: understanding what technologies are best for what purposes, following the evolving technology market, benchmarking and comparing systems, addressing organizational, social and behavioral issues for effective deployment and use of technology, pricing and budget issues

Community governance

Domain: governance challenges, models, and structures for communities
Members: community leaders, internal and external consultants, executive sponsors, CKO's and CLO's, "knowledge board" members who guide an organization-wide initiative, etc.
Issues: designing a governance structure for a community of practice, honoring the values of members, creating sub-committees and coordinating an overall governance process, understanding the role and function of a top-level advisory group, selecting members for various committees, making sure all the constituencies have a voice, avoiding bureaucracy.

Customer communities

Domain: organizing and sustaining productive communities among customers
Members: Internal and external consultants, executives of both provider and customer organizations, product-development and marketing managers
Issues: starting a customer community, orienting members, building on traditional focus groups, understanding how a community approach is different, leveraging both the ideas and relation-building benefits for the organization and for members, helping customers share knowledge about how to use and adapt an organization's products and services and take advantage of what others have learned from experience, getting leading customers to work closely with the organization to develop new products and services

Associations

Domain: applying a community-based approach to associations, professional societies, and other non-profit groups
Members: executive directors and staff, volunteer program leaders, leading professionals in their field, etc.
Issues: transforming an association that focuses primarily on informal networking, professional news, certification, and advocacy into one that provides rich opportunities for peer-to-peer learning; finding clusters of members who share particular problems and interests; providing more systematic ways to connect with peers with shared interests; cultivating "sub-communities"; building the association's capacity to provide an infrastructure so members can share knowledge, publish their work, and find colleagues who share a question or have an answer

Rural Innovation

Domain: applying a community-based approach to the conduct and dissemination of agricultural research
Members: researchers in agriculture, development specialists and consultants, members of international agencies
Issues: creating partnerships between local practitioners and researchers; understanding local customs; translating among perspectives; addressing issues of culture, power, and institutional transformation

Healthcare

Domain: community-based initiatives throughout the healthcare systems in many different countries: how communities have been developed, what works well, what innovations have resulted.
Members: health professionals in the entire healthcare system, from researchers to practitioners at a range of levels
Issues: time efficiency of communities in a stressed system, attracting appropriate investment and involvement

Wave 2: under consideration