Communities of practice - lessons from the World Bank

Thanks Joitske for pointing to this video about client based communities of practice in the World Bank.

First it was interesting to hear Monica Amorim describe the Rede Nos project in Brazil where they are using communities of practice to combat exclusion in the north and north-east of Brazil. She raises an issue I share which is the lack of non-English resources in development materials (and very very little in Portuguese).

I took notes on Erik Johnson's comments about one of their programmes of communities of practice for public expenditure management. His lessons are some of the same ones I've learned in other contexts. Here's a summary of what he said:

Challenges

1. Constellations of communities of practice. Whereas people begin by saying "we have six communities", there are really sub-sets and higher levels of communities. It is an organic process, not a fixed one.

2. The language issue. In videoconferences you can have simultaneous translation but in electronic communication it's unwieldy and expensive to think of translating everything.

3. Different paces of reforms in different countries.  People are sharing lessons at different stages. How do you create learning without some people feeling that they are less evolved or less important than the other?

4. Communication on an ongoing basis. How do you support that?

Criteria

1. WIFM. Whenever a community is identified you need to be clear that people's desire to learn  from each other that will enhance their work. The learning has to be something that will benefit what they are doing.

2. Ongoing communication. Support staff for the community of practice need to be already engaged with country teams and know the people involved in the projects. The "business" of community of practice should be one more thing to say in an ongoing conversation and not one extra task to do.

3. Preparation for the launch of the community or practice.  Preparation is key especially for people who haven't met before. Whoever is facilitating needs to be able to communicate with participants in advance and get a sense of their common interests so that the launch reflects those. Benchmarking can be used for that. What needs to come out of a launch is a learning agenda i.e. the key issues the community want to learn together.

(Bev asks: Why do people think that the launch starts at a face-to-face event? Why not have an online ramp-up where people start getting to know each other talking about their expectations?)

4. Sustainability. Even though it's a moving target, you have to think of how it's going to happen. You have the launch and then people are waiting to see what's going to happen. You need to keep things moving and not treat it as a one-off event.

(Bev says to John: We've never described our work on weaving online and face-to-face in relation to sustainability, but I think we should).

You have to have ways of engaging everyone who participated in the launch whether they attended or not - and at least one person from each country.

Importance of empowering the champions - work with them in defining the agenda and getting them to shape the issues.

5. Evaluation. It's difficult to evaluate because a community of practice is not a one-off event but an ongoing one. Neither is it a big loan or grant, so it's harder to define what the outcomes are. You need to think creatively about it. You can evaluate stories to understand the impact. And you can follow the impact of one member on another - you can track that causality through the community of practice and evaluate if the community of practice has helped that take place or not. There are no tools for that.

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