Even though Communities of Interest and Practice have two very different sets of goals requiring very different approaches, organizations often combine the two ideas.  The common goals are:

The goals of the CoP are focused on the performance of the community. Membership is often both controlled and compelled. Tony Timbol, consultant and columnist for the SPaMCAST, states;

“A CoP is improvement-oriented where “practices” are discussed and shared with the goal of improving. While practices may be of interest, a CoI is primarily information oriented where “information” is shared and discussed which may or may not lead to improvement.”

The two different goals collide. When the topic is on an explosive growth curve the collision and be buffered and ignored. For example, agile or Scrum  was growing at such a rate a few years ago (agile is still cool but market growth has begun to flatten) that  the goals of a CoP and CoI could coexist without scaring people off.  Passion and growth combine to cover up issues. When growth slows and the idea behind the community becomes less cool, compelled members do what is necessary to get counted as participating and those that are not compelled will drift away. Drifting away from the CoP does not mean that people stop looking for a way to engage their passion but rather they want to be less constrained.  Freddie Clark, a consultant, put it “(they) want to learn and engage the material.”  CoP participants don’t have that option.

Despite the goal collision, organizations mush CoI and CoPs together all the time. I recently saw an announcement inside an organization with all department leads as mandatory attendees, but heartily inviting all interested parties to a new community.  I would like to attend just to see if they took attendance. The combined goal of the combined community becomes something along the lines of “we want to synchronize behavior and we want the participants to be passionate about it.”  Joining two different goals together with an and is frightening because the two segments can easily conflict.  In most circumstances, conflating a CoI and a CoP will generally lead to a CoPout.