Community of practice

The organizational development (OD) concept of a community of practice (abbreviated as CoP) refers to the process of social learning that occurs when people in organizations, who have a common interest in some subject or problem, collaborate to share ideas, find solutions, and build innovations.

A wiki (such as Wikipedia.org) can be thought of as a virtual CoP.

The first person to develop the CoP term was theorist Etienne Wenger. http://www.ewenger.com/