Set up communities to foster a support network and create a learning culture/environment for our teams.

Premise: If we want teams to deliver in a collaborative style as a network of teams, what better place to start than through a learning network? Communities allow us to form a support network around specific practices and technologies.

It's essential that our teams share their learning with each other.

These are split broadly along two lines:

1. A community of practice: A group of people who practice the same discipline or role, and who want to share ideas about how to improve, for example, testers.
2. A community of interest: A group with broad backgrounds who are interested in learning about a particular subject, such as a technology or a specific way of doing something, for example, JavaScript frameworks, behavior-driven development, DevOps.

Teach: A community of practice consists of a group of people from across different teams who all have the same specialization, for example, Product Owner. They meet regularly to discuss the ins and outs of product ownership, to learn from each other, and to work as a group to generally improve the practice of product ownership across the organization:

A community of interest consists of people with different specializations who all have a shared interest in a particular practice, for example, test-driven development or a set of related practices such as DevOps. 

People with different backgrounds and roles will be interested in this type of community, as the following diagram shows:

To set up a community, we should first demonstrate how to do it and model the correct behavior.

Model: Set up initial communities of practice and interest; be present to coach the team. Set the topics for the first few by polling team members for ideas. You can run/facilitate this at first to set the tone. Have a Retrospective session with the group afterwards; ask them whether there was a good return on time invested (ROTI).

Coach: Seek volunteers to run a session. Coach the preparation of the session beforehand, run through their ideas, help them create a structure, and so on. Co-facilitate with them to run the session. 

Support: Help the group become freestanding and cede ownership by handing over the role to members of the community. To do, this create a group of community co-organizers. Stop facilitating. Feel free to attend when the group offers something of interest to you.