Lave and Wenger (1991) described a community of practice as “a set of relations among persons,
activity, and world, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping
communities of practice” (p. 98). They described three dimensions of communities of practice:
mutual engagement by participants; a joint enterprise or goal with some form of mutual
accountability; and a shared repertoire of, for example, discourse, tools, concepts, and ways of
doing things. More central participants are considered old-timers and help to enculturate less
central participants or newcomers.