What did the IT Managers Forum leave us?

20 years after its beginnings

Abstract

This article aims to provide an interpretation of the legacy of the APN IT Managers Forum, a collective and collaborative initiative developed in the Argentine Public Administration between 2002 and 2008, based on community experiences developed from that period until now. , and to the exploration of its context from an interdisciplinary perspective. To do this, we begin by analyzing the practices developed in this experience that we consider relevant from the point of view of innovation, and that are notably different from the ways of working and organizing work inherited from the industrial paradigm. Then, we characterize the forum as a set of communities of practice, an emerging concept from Silicon Valley, in particular from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and the Institute for Research on Learning, also noting that, being a very old phenomenon, it was only recently discovered. by studies of social anthropology and ethnography, inspired by Vygotsky's learning theory. Finally, we suggest considering the communities of practice together with other emerging digital technologies, part of the paradigm of the current technological revolution, for a better understanding of this phenomenon, and an expansion of the possibilities of action of human beings in this context.