Call for ideas around communities of practice

This post is a call for help and hopefully suggestions for how I can establish a community of practice around technology in learning and teaching. According to the introduction on the CQUniversity communities of practice web site, ‘Communities of Practice‘ (CoPs) are about bringing together people with common interests to SHARE practices and build knowledge. Online learning communities are essentially similar to communities of practice and a couple of wise men (Beer & Jones 2008) once wrote about the requirements for online learning communities:

• A home page to assert their existence and describe their domain and activities.
• One or more conversation spaces for online discussions.
• A repository for documents, including research reports, best practices and standards.
• A good search facility to find things in the knowledge base.
• A directory of membership with some information about members’ areas of expertise in the domain.
• A shared workspace for synchronous electronic collaboration.
• Community management tools, mostly for the coordinator but sometimes for the community at large. These might include the ability to know who is participating actively, which documents are downloaded and other measurement tools.

If anyone has any suggestions or advice it would be much appreciated. Of course if you know of a decent existing community that exists around technology in learning and teaching, please let me know as it may help prevent the reinvention of some wheels.