Where is the Action in Virtual Communities of Practice?

Over the past few years, viewing social groupings as “communities of practice” has become increasingly popular in the knowledge-management literature as communities of practice have been identified as settings for effective knowledge sharing. It is tempting to use the the concept to describe and to analyze “knowledge communities” as well. In this paper, we argue that the transfer of a concept that is deeply rooted in the lived-in world to the virtual involves conceptual problems, such as the question where learning and doing, two constituents of communities of practice, are to happen in the virtual world. In particular, we discuss selected aspects of combining communities of practice and virtual worlds by example of a virtual community that is situated in the global conferencing-system Usenet news.