1. Communities of Practice
State Bureau of Statistics Peer Learning Event
29-30 September, 2015

2. Knowledge is created in the heads of people (tacit) and
is difficult to capture and record (make explicit).

3. What is a Community of Practice
A Community of Practice (CoP) is a group of people who comes together for a shared learning.
It is a group of people who share a concern, a set of challenge or passion about what they do and interacts regularly to learn how to do it better.
It’s a community that shares practices.
One of the methods to capture individual knowledge.
Note, a CoP is not a pressure or action group.

4. Characteristics of a CoP
A Field or Domain of Interest.
Area of shared interest.
E.g. Data and Statistics
A Community.
Interaction
Building relationship in order to learn.
A Practice
Members must be practitioners in that field or profession

5. Objectives of CoP Networking and contacts Stimulating interaction
Fostering learning
Creating new knowledge
Socializing new members
Identifying and sharing best practices

6. Community Building Activities and Methods(1)
The hallmark of a CoP is that the community must interact to generate, share and deepen knowledge through some of the following:
Face-to-face meetings. Legal basis for the meeting E.g. the state statistics department is required to hold a 6- monthly meeting
Face-to-face trainings and events
List-serves: yahoo groups, google group
Social media: Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, BBM
Building sub-groups and working group around specific activities and tasks
Write regular report of meeting and circulate

7. Community Building Activities and Methods(2)
Online trainings, webinars and distance learning around a common topic
Sharing of Success Stories, Lessons Learned and Problems Solved
Agenda for every meeting with useful discussion points set jointly by SBS and NBS
Inviting non-member/experts to meetings occasionally
A key knowledge broker and facilitator
Online library of offline and online resources.
Use the CoP to encourage staff secondment and movement.

8. How to set-up a CoP
As soon as it is agreed, a face-to-face meeting should be conveyed so members can know each other.
Agree a date and time for meeting
Find a suitable venue
Send out reminders to members
Develop terms of reference and ground rule for discussion
Develop an agenda
Appoint a facilitator/secretariat
If possible, identify a knowledge broker
Plan for subsequent meeting

9. Is it doable? Can we have a chat about setting up a CoP?
Thanks for listening.
Is it doable? Can we have a chat about setting up a CoP?