Community of Practice
A community of practice is a group of people who share a craft and get better at it by talking to each other. They trade stories, work through problems, and build up a pool of knowledge that lives in the group rather than in any handbook.
The Xerox copier repairmen
The phrase comes from Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger's Situated Learning (1991), but the story that made it stick is Julian Orr's study of Xerox photocopier technicians (Talking About Machines, 1996). Xerox assumed its repair techs learned the job from official manuals. Orr watched them work and found the opposite. The knowledge that mattered moved around informally, over breakfast and at the parts counter and on radio calls between jobs, as technicians swapped "war stories" about strange failures the manuals never covered. The community was where the expertise lived, not the documentation. Xerox later built a database to capture those stories, but the lesson was already clear: knowing your job well is a social thing.
Why this matters more for remote workers
Notice that all of that learning happened because the technicians shared space and downtime. The office, the coffee machine, lunch — none of those were perks. They were the plumbing that turned a bunch of individuals into a profession, and it ran for free, just because everyone showed up to the same building.
Remote work pulls that plumbing out, and the research on what happens next isn't subtle. Buffer's State of Remote Work reports have put loneliness near the top of remote workers' struggles year after year. A bigger warning came from a 2022 study of Microsoft employees in Nature Human Behaviour: when the company went fully remote, people's collaboration networks got more siloed and more static. They talked more to the contacts they already had and far less across groups. Those cross-group "weak ties" are exactly what sociologist Mark Granovetter showed in 1973 are the real source of new jobs, leads, and information, and they're the first thing to go when you stop running into people.
So remote workers inherit a quiet structural problem. The office used to manufacture professional community as a byproduct of showing up. Take away the building and the byproduct vanishes, but the need for it doesn't. You still need people to compare notes with, to tell you what tools and rates and clients are actually working, to make your bad weeks feel normal. The difference now is that nobody builds that for you. You have to do it on purpose. What used to be automatic has to be deliberate. People who skip it drift into the exact isolation that Microsoft study describes. People who do it get the informal learning network Orr showed is the real engine of getting good at your work.
Why it's only for Masterclass members
A community of practice isn't a public forum, and that's deliberate. Lave and Wenger were specific about why these groups work: shared practice and real commitment. Members need a common craft, a common vocabulary, and some skin in the game. Open the doors to anyone and you don't get a community of practice, you get a noisy crowd with no shared ground. That's why general social media is so useless for actually getting better at your job.
So this community is for African & Caribbean people who register for the Remote Work Masterclass. The course gives everyone the same framework, the same language, the same standard of work. Registration isn't a wall around the community. It's the floor everyone has to be standing on for the community to work at all.
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