Hello, I'm Rick Blunt. This "conversation" is about making "Communities of Practice" more understandable and accessible. I've been dealing with Communities of Practice for the better part of three decades. Yet, if you asked me as recently as five years ago what a Community of Practice was, I would have been clueless. What that means, is that Communities of Practice are already all around you. You may be already part of one and not even know it. The concept that drove home to me how subtly pervasive Communities of Practice are, is the concept of "Peer-to-Peer" or P2P. P2P became popularized with the file swapping technology phenomenon started by Napster. Since Napster, other P2P applications followed such as KaZaA, Gnutella, Morpheus, Groove Networks, and many more. So, what does P2P have to do with Communities of Practice, Learning Networks and the "Speed of Business?" Communities of Practice are about finding and participating with other "equal" professionals (P2P) to help everyone in the community learn from each other (learning networks) how to do their jobs better in today's fast-paced, "Internet-speed" work environment (Speed of Business).