Towards the appropriation of communities of practice in the State's IT areas

Abstract

The objective of this article is to provide an interpretation of the social phenomenon known as "communities of practice," a unified process of working, learning, and innovating, and its impact on the life of government IT departments. It is based on our experiences cultivating these communities within the jurisdiction of the Chief of Staff of Ministers and CONICET (National Scientific and Technical Research Council). To this end, we begin with the premise that there is a pervasive social phenomenon in all the variants of communities of practice that arise in practice, suggesting the existence of certain innate human capacities that make it possible. We then consider this discovery and the development of its concept, promoted by Xerox PARC, the leading IT laboratory in Silicon Valley, through the Institute for Research on Learning, based on social anthropology, ethnography, and Vygotsky's learning theory. Later, we present our vision of these communities within organizations and our experiences in this regard. Finally, we suggest the existence of a social dimension to computing, as part of the great cultural shift signified by the decline of Cartesianism and its "technical vision" of the world.