I was just re-reading some papers from IBM’s Institute for Knowledge-Based Organizations (now called Institute for Business Value). I’m writing a report describing an approach to establishing a community of practice for project managers and thinking about how much of their budget should be spent on the important costs categories. The paper by Fontain and Millen (reference below) provides four useful cost categories: roles (most salaries), activities (most meeting costs such as travel), technology, and content. There research is based on examining 24 comunities of practice and there were able to get 12 of the CoP leaders together and asked them, “how would you allocate your budget when starting a new CoP?” This is what they said:

“On average, the teams allocated 52% of the community budget to pay for salaries (and incentives) for community workers. On average, 32% was used to pay for meeting expenses, 10% for technology and 6% for publishing and promotion expenses.” (p. 5)

This accords with my own experience and what I’ve heard from other CoP leaders.

What are your experiences in this area? I’ve noticed it is not something we see discussed in papers very often yet is essential information when planning a new CoP initiative.