Are communities of practice getting smaller?

In our survey of Knowledge Management around the world, we asked a series of questions about Communities of Practice, one of which was “What is the typical size (number of members) of your CoPs and Knowledge Sharing networks?    Please choose the nearest number from the list below”.

We then gave them a series of size ranges to choose from (given that we had responses form organisations from 10 people to 30 people).

The graph above shows the number of responses for each size range, and I have restricted this graph to internal CoPs rather than external. The results from this years survey are in blue, and the results from the 2014 survey are in red.

The number of CoPs of around 10 people has increased over the last 2 years, while the number in every other size range other than the largest has decreased.

The plot below shows this as a percentage of the results rather then the absolute number of results.

This is an interesting result, and if real is perhaps rather worrying, given that larger CoPs generally perform much better than smaller ones.