In the pre-industrial age, communities existed to connect people. People joined guilds to find mentors who would help them master their crafts. During the industrial revolution, workplace tasks were divided into small chunks to help employers define their employees' roles and responsibilities. With the advent of the knowledge worker, the workplace has undergone another transformation. Now, jobs that involve the most complex type of interactions make up the fastest-growing segments in many industries (Sauve, 2007). The reality is that in many industries in which situations change rapidly, formal learning once or twice a year doesn't provide employees with the experience or knowledge they need to find ongoing success on the job. This means that organisations must revamp their budgets and shift their resources from formal learning settings to informal situations in which the majority of learning actually takes place. The rise of social computing based on highly innovative new Web 2.0 technologies such as MySpace.com, YouTube.com, Digg.com and Facebook.com, offers a new paradigm for how we approach learning and knowledge sharing and is beginning to have a powerful impact on corporate learning (Sauve, 2007). Business cultures are changing rapidly to take advantage of these new technologies. Today the concept of knowledge sharing through new interactive online tools is taking hold in more and more public and private organisations. The change from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy forced many organisations to change their modus operandi if they were going to survive in a sustainable way. The introduction of communities of practice (CoPs) by Lave and Wenger in 1991 shed new light on knowledge sharing and dissemination of information. Sharing, interacting, actively participating, collaborating and learning from one another become the central activities in a knowledge society. According to Wenger (1998), CoPs are everywhere. We are core members of some and we belong to others more peripherally. CoPs are informal, naturally occurring, spontaneously evolving groups and the sense of community comes from defining them in terms of practice (Kubiak, 2003). In a knowledge based development approach to modern societies as suggested by Ergazakis, Metaxiotis & Psarras (2006), CoPs can be used as the originators of change and innovation for a 'knowledge city'. This paper will address the role that CoPs can play in the development of a 'knowledge city'.
