Every now and then I come across something that I just sums up a lot of stuff I’ve been reading and thinking about – here’s one of those. It’s a slide presentation by Andrew Hinton titled Architectures for Conversation (ii): What Communities of Practice can mean for Information Architecture and is available on SlideShare.
Andrew’s done a great job of bringing together a whole lot of thinking about information architecture and how it relates to our understandings of “communities of practice”. I love some of the metaphors he uses – like, why Wikipedia is more like an AK-47 than like an M-16, and how he distinguishes between communities and communities of practice.
Each slide is annotated if you view it in full-screen mode, and with 71 slides make sure you give yourself a bit of time to read it all! An informative and entertaining presentation.