Wednesday 28 September 2011

Insights in Learning Communities - Share Fair

This week the Share Fair is taking place in Rome. Many interesting presentations and discussions are taking place about a great number of issues of interest for ICCO’s work: Public-Private partnerships, access to markets, use of social media in development and many others.

On the first day Etienne Wenger gave a very interesting key-note speech about Communities of Practice (CoP’s). This was a really interesting presentation/discussion and I suppose that all those within the ICCO Alliance who are somehow involved in the Communities of Learning (which in fact also are CoP’s) would like to know what Etienne said. His main messages were that it is just impossible to start CoP’s from top-down because partnership (partners in learning from practice) among the members of the community is essential and. Furthermore CoP’s need ‘social artists’ who are able to establish and nourish these partnerships and also ‘transversal people’ who manage to relate well with all (management) layers within an organisation. 

But as good summaries about Etienne Wengers’ talk are available on other blogs I will not repeat it all here, please have a look at the blogpost from Simone Staiger and the video interview of Pier Andrea Pirani. 

And by the way on the Share Fair blog there are many other interesting posts to read!

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