I’m planning to be in Hong Kong for the The 3rd Asia-Pacific International Conference on Knowledge Management (11–13 December) and as part of the conference I will be running a half day workshop on Starting and Sustaining Communities of Practice on the 15th of December. You can register for the workshop here. Here is the description of the workshop. Of course there will be a good amount of narrative included the workshop.

Communities of practice are one of the most powerful organizational structures available to connect people, access expertise, facilitate learning and create business value. But communities of practice are often fickle, and present paradoxical challenges in their design and management.

This interactive half-day workshop is designed to help participants to design and foster sustainable communities of practice within their organizations, be they public sector, private enterprise or not-for-profit. The workshop will address the creation of social structures that can take responsibility for fostering learning, developing skills and artifacts, and managing knowledge. It will help participants to understand how to balance the need for sustainable communities by having both autonomy and informality; and for the community to be structured to support organizational objectives.