I first started thinking about virtual or Internet-based Communities of Practice (CoPs) in late 2000. At the time I was finishing a master's degree in Information Technology Management at ITESM, in Mexico City, and I was about to embark on a six-year part-time distance-learning PhD in Management at the University of Bradford. I had a full time job, as the systems person of a small organization, and they had agreed to sponsor my PhD and allow me a couple of afternoons to work on the dissertation.
I was lucky to begin my master's in 1996, a time when you connected to the Internet by modem, and e-mail was just starting (in fact I introduced it in my organization). Furthermore, ITESM was at the time a pioneer of Internet-based degrees. The one I studied had a mixed mode of delivery: I attended a weekly lecture which was broadcast by satellite from Monterrey to all ITESM campuses, and did all other coursework and course interactions through the Internet. So this gave me an early feel for the possibilities and limitations online discussion groups and distributed teamwork.
At ITESM I took a couple of courses in Knowledge Management, and one topic that I found very interesting was CoPs. I first read about them in Tom Stewart's excellent book Intellectual Capital. It's a bit dated now, but it conveys, in a very engaging way, the excitement of those early days of the Information Revolution. Stewart did not invent the CoP concept, but was very enthusiastic about it. It was then that I first thought that the Internet would be a good place to search for like-minded colleagues to form a "virtual" peer group.
Later I read works by Etienne Wenger, who with Jean Lave first proposed the CoP concept back in 1991. The groups they described were all face-to-face, but I didn't see any reason why this couldn't take place online, at least for some kinds of knowledge work. So when I started thinking about doing a PhD, I thought that proving CoPs could function effectively over the Internet would be a good topic. On my first trip to Bradford (I went every year for a couple of weeks) I was lucky to connect with Dr. David Spicer, who believed in the topic from the start, and became my supervisor. And so, I began my research by trying to locate existing CoPs working over the Internet. This soon led me to the Usenet network, where discussion groups were named and hierarchically organized according to their topical focus. At the time, there were about 80 thousand newsgroups, and I felt sure there ought to be some successful Usenet-based CoPs among them. However, I had to devise a systematic procedure to evaluate newsgroups and narrow my search. But this I will describe in my next post.
