Community of Practice

The Community of Practice is one of the most important activities of the UPPScience project.

Community building is the essence of any project that works with a network frame of mind. A Community of Practice is more than just networking. It is a group of individuals usually from the same professional field who come together for a specific purpose.

Wenger (1998) describes the structure of a CoP as consisting of three interrelated terms: 'mutual engagement', 'joint enterprise' and 'shared repertoire' (Wenger 1998, pp. 72–73).

• Mutual Engagement: through participation in the community, members establish norms and build collaborative relationships; this is termed mutual engagement. These relationships are the ties that bind the members of the community together as a social entity.
• Joint Enterprise: through their interactions, they create a shared understanding of what binds them together; this is termed the joint enterprise. The joint enterprise is (re)negotiated by its members and is sometimes referred to as the 'domain' of the community.
• Shared Repertoire: As part of its practice, the community produces a set of communal resources, which is termed their shared repertoire; this is used in the pursuit of their joint enterprise and can include both literal and symbolic meanings.
  

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  The UPPScience project built on the work of the VISConti project that started up the Community of Practice. VISConti also started up the online platform on which the Community of Practice interacts. UPPScience enlarged the Community, widened its scope and included a larger number of fields of study.