 Dear students, now we are going to talk about the distributed community of practice. So distributed community of practice is a kind of virtual community network which can be defined as a group of geographically dispersed professionals who share common practices and interest in particular area of concern and whose activities can be enriched and mediated by information and communication technologies. So, when we define distributed community of practice, there are particularly three points that needs to be understood. The first one is that distributed community of practice is a group of geographically dispersed professionals. It means to say that the members of the such kind of online community networks do not belong to a particular area or do not belong to a particular state. They may be of the different geographical locations or may be of from the different states, but they share a common practice and interest in a particular area of concern. Let me give the example of for instance, the economics, for instance, there is a group of professionals who are working to control the inflation or who are working for the economic development of the Pakistan and they are working in different organizations, but they have their own online community group in which they share their different kinds of information, their thoughts, their point of views on different policies to address the issue of inflation or to address the issue of economic development of the Pakistan. So, these activities, those are professionals who as a member of one online group sharing and discussing with each others, their activities are actually become possible due to the information communication technologies. Because they are working in different organizations, they are working in different setups and they belong to different geographical areas. It was not possible for them to sit in a physical space on one time in order to address such issues. This is the only possibility for them to share and exchange their ideas to online community network. So, the concept of distributed community of practice aims to move beyond connectivity to achieve new levels of community interactivity, bringing together diverse groups and encouraging knowledge and information sharing among people, organization and communities. So, whenever we talk about the development of the communities of the practice, so these such kind of communities have been developed to achieve certain agenda and the agenda is not just to bring professionals of same interest or professional of similar areas on one page. Their agenda is above than that and in order to achieve common goals, they have to collectively participate and to be engaged in discussions that develop the knowledge and in order to do that, they have to discuss with each other through this online platform and by doing so, they develop the knowledge, they share the information and such information is productive for the people, organizations and communities as well. So, what are the features of distributed community of practice? The first feature is the shared interest. So, membership in such communities is not based on the formal goal or it is not based on the location bounding, it is just based on the voluntary principle that people become the member of particular community of practice because they share similar kind of interest with other community members. Common identity is the second feature of the communities of practice and members develop shared understanding and common identity. So, they may be identify themselves as economists or as the development experts when they become a member of particular community network and their participation as I explained earlier is the is based on the voluntary principle. So, they become the member of such communities on the basis of voluntary participation. Shared information and knowledge is the last feature of such communities. The purpose of developing such communities is to share information, exchange ideas and develop knowledge in order to achieve a collective agenda. As I gave earlier the example of the economic development of the Pakistan, so on this particular common issue, they may share information related to policy, they may exchange ideas in order to develop to make better policies and how to make the process of development more productive for the Pakistani society. So, autonomy in setting goal is another feature of distributed community of practice. So, the members as they are the professional ones as they are the experts once they need autonomy in setting their goals. Otherwise, such groups becomes just a page or a portal to just share the information. If they have the autonomy, they can engage in policy development, they can engage in a knowledge creation as well. So, the other feature of the community distributed community of practice is the awareness of social protocols and goals. Members in a distributed community of practice are normally aware of the acceptable social protocols and goals of the community. This is what they know before becoming the part of that community and this is what they want to achieve through becoming the member of the community. Awareness of membership, when we talk about the membership, so they must be aware of the membership that as a member what kind of facility they have. Members in a distributed community of practice are normally aware of each other in the community. Individuals have a reasonable knowledge of who is who and what they do in the community. So, as we are talking about the professionals and the professionals know each other well before even becoming the part of the community and they know what are their skills, what kind of contribution he or she has in the community and what is his contribution to the society. The last feature of distributed community of practice is effective means of communication. If communication among others remains a key distinguished factor among communities, robust communication may include face-to-face meetings and technology mediated communication such as email, video conferencing, discussion, forums, web page, intelligent agents. So, in distributed community of practice as they have been developed to achieve a particular common agenda, so in order to achieve that agenda, they communicate effectively and for the effective communication, they do meetings online and offline as well. And when we talk about the online meetings, they do this through the video conferencing and through the emails and through the discussion forums. So, this is all about the distributed community of practice and how distributed community of practice is different from other online community networks.