STC’s Communities of Practice—Networking with Our Peers
by Roger A. Grice, STC’s Assistant to the President for Outreach, and Fellow and Chapter Advisor, RPI/Jay R. Gould Student Chapter

Technical communication is a broad field—its practitioners perform many different tasks in many different industries. Technical communicators may write technical documents, design multimedia presentations, create Web pages, or illustrate mechanical designs. And they may perform these tasks in industries such as aerospace, biotech, computer software, or agribusiness. To effectively network with your peers, you need to find your communities of practice.

What is a “community of practice”? Different people have defined the term differently. On the “Awakening Technology” Web site ( www.awaken.com), Peter and Trudy Johnson-Lenz define such a community as “a group of professionals, informally bound to one another through exposure to a common class of problems, common pursuit of solutions, and thereby themselves embodying a store of knowledge.” And in an article for Fast Company, John Seely Brown writes, “They are peers in the execution of ‘real work.’ What holds them together is a common sense of purpose and a real need to know what each other knows. There are many communities of practice within a single company, and most people belong to more than one of them.” (See www.fast company.com. ) Within STC, communities of practice can be described as groups of STC members engaged in similar activities to achieve similar goals.

Communities of practice have been the focus of a lot of attention lately within STC. Our mission statement now includes the phrase. The reason is that, for most of us, communities of practice are the key to the future of our careers.

What Are Our Communities of Practice?
Think about your connection to technical communication—in other words, what you do, how you work, and what your deliverables are. Think about the people you meet at STC meetings and conferences. Who are these people and to what communities of practice do they belong?

The list is probably endless, but the most common communities within STC are the following:

Finding Our Place within STC
Until relatively recently, the STC organization has focused on chapters made up of people in the same city or general area that were in turn organized into regions. Chapters provide a matrix that enables people with different skills and capabilities—that is, people who belong to different communities of practice—to meet, network, and serve one another. This structure has served us well in the past, and it will continue to serve us well in the future.

But we also need to look at other ways to categorize and group our members— by interest or career specialty, in short, by community of practice. The rise of STC special interest groups (SIG’s) and their increase in number, membership, and activity speaks to STC members’ desire to affiliate with others who deal with similar issues and challenges in the workplace.

Growing within STC
As we evolve in our careers and become involved in new aspects of our profession, we find that the nature of our work becomes more advanced and sophisticated. For instance, a technical writer’s job may eventually evolve into that of an information architect.

With this sort of evolution comes a need for very specialized knowledge. For some people, STC’s support may seem too general. The organization that nurtured us in the early phases of our careers may no longer seem to fit.

Some people leave STC at this point. However, I’d like to offer an alternative: Seek out your community of practice within STC. You can find fellow members who have made the same transition. These members have found that STC is still meeting their needs, perhaps even more than before.

Spotlighting STC’s Communities of Practice
So how do you find your community of practice? In future issues of Intercom, we’ll explore this idea further. We’ll spotlight the various communities of practice within STC, describing their foundations and practices. Obviously SIG’s have a role to play in uniting communities of practice, and so do many conference events. We’ll look at these, and we’ll include brief profiles of prominent community members.

We already have several topics and profiles lined up, and those will appear in Intercom soon. However, we’re also looking beyond that. We’d like to hear about your experiences crossing over from one community of practice to another and to have your advice and tips for those members who seek to grow within a community. Please send your ideas to Roger Grice at out@stc.org .

Communities of practice are the future for all our professionals. For that reason, they are most certainly the future of STC.

Suggested Readings
“Communities of Practice.” Free white paper on building successful communities of practice. www.tomoye.com

Saint-Onge, Hubert, and Debra Wallace. Leveraging Communities of Practice for Strategic Advantage. London: Butterworth- Heinemann, 2002

Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998

Wenger, Etienne, Richard McDermott, and William M. Snyder. Cultivating Communities of Practice. Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2002