Practitioners are at their most effective when they are connected to, and sustained by, communities of practice.[1]  Such networks not only foster a sense of common identity but are crucially important in the development and dissemination of knowledge (much of which is often tacit knowledge) and in solving problems that are beyond the scope of isolated individuals. Communities of practice can form spontaneously within any knowledge domain but are especially important in deeply technical fields. They cannot generally be brought into existence artificially: a community of practice is an organic entity with a complex, volatile and autonomous internal logic. Often however they exist in latent form and may be prevented from flourishing by constraints of various kinds. One of the functions of organisational leadership and management is to identify and eliminate such constraints. DITCHE cannot eliminate internal constraints. It can however facilitate spaces within which communities of practice, latent or not, can expand. There are several ways in which it can do this - for example:

• Through events which bring practitioners together to learn and to teach, to coach and to mentor, to discuss and to reflect, to share insights and vent frustrations, and to discover and reaffirm their sense of belonging to a community.
• By facilitating access to technical resources such as books and other repositories of professional information, as well as access to corporate expertise (such as speakers, training materials, reference material, and consulting).
• By facilitating problem-solving in ways that augment capacity, either directly or by freeing resources to do other things.
• By acting as a repository that allows institutions and individuals to share their expertise, documents, tools and solutions with one another.

This list is a point of departure only. The possibilities are limited only by the ingenuity of the participants themselves. An essential precondition for this initiative, however, is that potential participants be given both the space and the encouragement to engage in it.

What IT Directors can do:

• Encourage staff to participate, and ensure that they take the time to do so.
• If you have particular expertise in any domain, be willing to share it, and encourage staff who have expertise to share it.
• Be willing to sacrifice short-term objectives for long-term benefits. Having half your staff away at a Techie Event may disrupt service levels temporarily, but the benefits to them and to your institution far outweigh such costs.
• Offer yourself as a leader of a special-interest or best-practice group, under DITCHE's auspices, in your particular domain of expertise.
• Suggest ways in which you think DITCHE could do useful things, either for your institution or for the wider community of IT professionals in South African public higher education.

What Vice-Chancellors and Rectors can do:

• Support your IT Director in contributing to this initiative.
• Support the capacity development goals and the activities that these entail.
• Champion the investment of time and energy spent in training and in participation in these communities of practice.

What Corporate Partners can do:

Contribute your expertise in any form that you can. Obvious possibilities are donations of training materials or software, discounted access to training, lending equipment for technical events, and making technical experts available for events.

There are many benefits - some obvious and some less obvious - to participating in this program. They include:

• A potentially expanded market. Greater IT capacity in higher education institutions means that these institutions will do more complex things with information technology, including using a much greater subset of product offerings than is presently the case.
• Reduced support costs.
• Showcase implementations.
• Benefitting from the expertise of higher education, which is often at the forefront of innovative use of IT.
• And, of course, contributing to a worthy initiative!

[1] The term communities of practice is most commonly associated with the work of Wenger et al. See for example Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Cambridge University Press, 1999)