SLA Boston Debuts Its Communities of Practice
By Millie Gonzalez, vmg569@yahoo.com

SLA Boston has its own Communities of Practice (CoP) site for members across New England to share information and exchange ideas. The community is located at http://cop.sla.org. To gain access to the community, enter your last name and pin number.

According to noted CoP scholar Etienne Wenger, communities of practice are “groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and who interact regularly to learn how to do better.” SLA offers communities of practice for its members in an effort to encourage peer-to-peer learning and to serve as an alternative to its other professional development course offerings. The Boston Chapter CoP contains areas for FAQs, news, links, resources, discussions, events and virtual chat.

Dee Magnoni and I are the facilitators of the CoP. Our role is to populate the community site with content, answer any questions, and serve as evangelists. We will do our best to entice you to log on. We have plans to create an FAQ, update the calendar of events, host virtual chats, create events, and post news. I urge everyone to populate the community with links and presentations or host virtual chats with your colleagues. The CoP will thrive only if its members actively use it. The content management system is robust and simple to use. You can personalize your own CoP, send messages to members of the community or poke around other SLA communities. So please stop by! Once you log in, you can send me a message anytime. I look forward to your questions and your contributions.

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