Welcome to the Community of Practice Network!

Check out the following resources to learn more about the Community of Practice concept and connect with others in the area.

Communities of Practice Guide is a guide to creating, reinvigorating or transforming a community of practice. Where is your CoP now? Where would you like to be?

Communities

Agile Community of Practice is a newer community of practice dedicated to helping each other and anyone interested in learning about Agile. We're trying to improve how we use it for software development and other areas of our jobs. Come and join us! This CoP meets once per month.

Campus Designers is intended for hands-on campus artists of all varieties, including traditional graphic designers, web/online media designers, videographers, and more.

Campus Lab Managers Community of Practice This group supports Community driven best practices for lab management professionals at UW-Madison. Communities of practice serve many purposes. Collaborate with colleagues who share similar challenges. Share your expertise. Join us to discuss ways to optimize lab and core success. This community is for anyone who is in a lab management role including research labs, core labs and instructional labs.For more information, email labmanagercop@mailplus.wisc.edu

Campus Supervisors Network (CSN) strives to support our campus managers and supervisors in a welcome and safe environment, where ideas can be shared and connections can be made with other people at the university in similar roles facing similar challenges. CSN's goal is to create a better network for supervisors to learn how to be more effective in their position of leadership and help them excel by removing barriers.

ComETS is a grassroots network of UW-Madison teaching and support staff. ComETS works to support educational technology professionals with networking opportunities, collaborative exploration of emerging trends, and representation on campus committees.

Community Partnerships & Outreach (CPO) Staff Network is a learning community of outreach staff and community partners, committed to the manifestation of the Wisconsin Idea. They share best practices, promote the Wisconsin Idea across campus and community, and support ongoing knowledge development regarding boundary spanning and community-based research and service efforts. 

Conscious Communication (Nonviolent Communication)

Data Wonks CoP This community of practice fosters rewarding collaboration around shared data literacy and data processing tools. In the context of an ever changing data landscape, the group holds regular meetings for individuals who work with data (e.g., InfoAccess) and associated tools (such as Tableau, Qualtrics, SharePoint, PowerApps, Microsoft Access) at UW-Madison. 

Focus on Facilitation is an informal network of OQI consultants, volunteer facilitators, and others interested in "the art" of facilitation.

Leadership Improv The Leadership Improv community of practice embraces and teaches about leadership using the foundational concepts of improv comedy: being present, accepting input from others, and building the impossible together. Our vision is to make everyone aware of the shared core competencies between leadership and improvisational comedy through hands-on practice, as well as to discuss how practicing improv skills can help you improve your ability to be an effective leader. Our approach enables participants to become comfortable in leadership, public communications, and challenging situations.

 Madison Integrals Learning Community explores integral theory application in health, spirituality, education, conflict resolution, facilitation and other areas. (The resource page is still active for this group but they no longer convene for a meeting.

Quilters Group explores alternative workplace paradigms and their implications for organization, work flow, physical space, decision-making, technology, and related areas.

Servant Leadership Learning Community focuses on the concept that's increasingly viewed as an ideal leadership form to aspire to, where other people's highest priority needs are being served, while those being served grow as people.

UW-Madison Coordinated Leadership Initiative Learning Community explores applications of the UW-Madison Leadership Framework across campus, through a range of courses, workshops, and other learning opportunities. 

UW-Maniac is an experiment in learning, where you will make connections, get ideas for your own projects, and offer ideas to others that can help them make progress in their own initiatives.

Resources

Servant Leadership Wiki is designed to help you navigate the topic of Servant Leadership and is full of resources on how to utilize this in your daily life. 

Asia Development Bank Report: Outlines how communities of practice work and how you can build one. Communities of practice are groups of like-minded, interacting people who filter, analyze, invest and provide, convene, build, and learn and facilitate to ensure more effective creation and sharing of knowledge in their domain. 

The HR Communities of Practice is an online collaborative space that facilitates sharing ideas, raising questions, and offering diverse perspectives that advances our learning as a community of HR professionals. Within the Office of Human Resources, this Wiki page serves to share resources and knowledge through the “collaborative goodwill” of the campus community. 

The Learning and Talent Development CoP Evaluation Report documents the impacts of seven CoPs sponsored by that office over the past decade. An accompanying presentation of the results and their implications is also available. 

Planning and Evaluation Social Learning provides an overview video that goes through each cycle of the Social learning Framework and how it can transform practice.  
Promoting and Assessing Value Creation in Communities and Networks:
As communities and networks go mainstream, there is an increasing demand from organizations to have ways of monitoring their value. How can we make the connection between the activities of a community or network and the improved performance of an organization, institution or even a country? In our value assessment framework, published by the Open University of the Netherlands, we identify five levels of value creation of a community or network.

• clarifications about the distinct learning value of communities and networks respectively
• a conceptual framework to understand the value from such learning in terms of five cycles of value creation
• examples of indicators for each cycles
• a template for telling stories that account for value creation
• a toolkit for collecting data

Seven Principles for Cultivating Communities of Practice presents a series of community case studies following these 7 principles for cultivating communities of practice. 

• Design for evolution
• Open a dialogue between inside and outside perspectives
• Invite different levels of participation
• Develop both public and private community spaces
• Focus on value
• Combine familiarity and excitement
• Create a rhythm for the community

For additional information on various Communities of Practice, contact Sarah Carroll at sgcarroll@wisc.edu.