I would have posted on Nova’s site, but comments appear to be closed. I’m relatively new to the blogosphere, but I’ve been around eLearning, CMS, knowledge management, and groupware technologies for more than 10 years. In all of that time, I *have* heard and seen a significant corpus of work published around Communities of Practice — vetted by eLearning and KM professionals — and a concept pioneered by Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave in numerous publications and *real* software packages since _1991_.

I think it’s a shame that Messrs Spivack and Lefkowitz are simply slapping a few quick blog posts and tags on someone else’s hard work, calling it a “Community of Purpose,” and now acting like children to claim it a new ‘meme’ that they discovered. You can’t discover something that many, many people are already aware of, and using today. And just because a term wasn’t coined within the last 30 days (literally, if you look at the posting dates), it doesn’t mean that it’s fair game to be co-opted.

If you google “Community of Practice,” you will see (if define:ing) that these concepts are basically the same thing. And, if you google the Web for the two different terms, there is no clear difference in meaning. Yet, when I search Mr Lefkowitz’ site, there is no mention of the term “Community of Purpose” dating back to the 2002 inception of his blog.

Personally, I think that the proof of who gets to claim a real contribution to ‘CoPs’ will be evident when we see a live service, and not just blog entries, putting these valuable methodologies to real work.

Thanks

I’ve been preaching about “Communities of Purpose” and exactly this theme since as far back as 2002:

http://www.antseyeview.com/

Glad somebody is finally picking up on it

it´s a goal-orientated community.