Communities of practice are groups of people who are informally bound by a shared expertise and passion and come together to share experiences, create new knowledge and solve problems through interactions with fellow community members (Zhang and Watts, 2008). It has been shown that they are especially critical for practitioners who do not yet have direct access to other people in their industry (Wasko and Faraj, 2000).
Hemmasi and Csanda (2009) found that communities of practice are instrumental in allowing people to establish connections with others in similar roles, regardless of physical distance, and create immense value through increased access to ideas, best practices and knowledge shared by community members. Research shows that members of communities of practice actively participate and take the time to help others simply because they find it fun to participate and derive satisfaction and enjoyment from helping others (Wasko and Faraj, 2000). Many individuals view their knowledge as a public good and are motivated to share it because of a sense of moral obligation, community interest and sometimes even go so far as to mentor new practitioners in the community in an effort to give back (Ardichvili et al, 2003).
Even someone who doesn't work remotely would undoubtedly benefit from being part of an online group of peers with whom they can get in contact relatively quickly and easily, ask questions, pose issues/ specific problems and get suggestions from in a short time-frame. Online communities are open to any individual who is interested in participating, have no limit to the number of people who can join and can be fantastic sources to expertise directly from industry leading experts (Wasko and Faraj, 2000).
Since I've been learning to code alongside my pursuit of this master's degree, I realised that I spend a lot of time in programming forums trying to find help whenever I come across a problem. For instance, I spend a lot of time on websites like Stack Overflow, because odds are someone else has already asked a similar question to the one I have and if not I can ask it myself and get a response relatively quickly. These types of forums make it so much easier to collaborate with other programmers and get solutions to problems even though we're all scattered across the world and many of us work remotely. I have now begun looking for active UX/UI design forums and have already entered a few, such as the UXMastery forum, the Stack Exchange UX forum and the Figma community forum.
Ardichvili, A., Page, V., & Wentling., T. (2003). Motivation and barriers to participation in virtual knowledge-sharing communities of practice. Journal of Knowledge Management, 7(1), 64–77.
Hemmasi, M., & Csanda, C. M. (2009). The Effectiveness of Communities of Practice: An Empirical Study. Journal of Managerial Issues, 21(2), 262–279.
Wasko, M. and Faraj, S. (2000). “It is what one does”: why people participate and help others in electronic communities of practice. Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 9(2-3).
Zhang, W., & Watts, S. (2008). Online communities as communities of practice: A case study. Journal of Knowledge Management, 12(4), 55-71.
