AN ON-LINE PROFESSIONAL COMMUNITY is a powerful way of gathering, organizing, and sharing knowledge within an organization. Each individual person within a group (such as science teachers in a school district) holds individual pieces of knowledge that, if brought together, would produce a pool of knowledge in which the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts. In developing such an on-line community, both designers and those who are to be participants must understand that there are two stages in the community's creation: Stage 1 in which knowledge and resources are collected and inputed into an on-line library of information, and Stage 2 in which the community develops to the point where there is input and output of information within the community.

When a professional community first goes on-line, the structure of the website may be in place, but there will be little or no library of knowledge within it. Participants must be aware of the development stage of the community. Research shows that most people who visit on-line communities take information rather than share information, so in its initial stage the usefulness of the community may not be evident to the participants.

Within an organization some incentive or motivation must exist before people will sense the need to share knowledge with others especially if there is an atmosphere of competition. In addition, clear expectations and purposes for participation must be explained as well as how the information that is submitted is going to be used. 
A group of science teachers, for example, may be asked to contribute various lesson plans, labs, activities, or assessments to the community. As this knowledge is collected it can then be made available to other science teachers to use or evaluate.

In its initial stage, an on-line professional community is more like an empty bookshelf that is going to be filled rather than a resource center for people in the organization to use and contribute to as demonstrated in the graphic above.

Stage 2 occurs sometime after the initial creation of the on-line community in which participants have inputed information thus creating a library of knowledge. At this stage information begins to flow in and out of the community as ideas that are shared can be used and brought back with additional knowledge or insights. This is demonstrated in the image below. 

The goal of the community then switches from one of gathering knowledge to that of participants being allowed to use the knowledge to increase the overall productivity of the organization. For example, the community of science teachers previously mentioned would be able to use the community to access materials instead of creating them, thus allowing more time to focus on individual student achievement.

The Educators Manifesto - Information on the topic of digital learning communities, of which a professional community is in part. 

John Spiegel, Graduate Student, SDSU Educational Technology