I prepared a toolbox of activities for community of practice events and workshops for the Central Advisory Services on Intellectual Property for a workshop in January, earlier this year.

These tools are activities and processes that can help support the objectives of a workshop or meeting and include:

• Yellow Pages Directory
• Social Network Mapping
• Evening News
• Online Tools
• Facilitation
• Samoan Circle
• Peer Coaching

They are not tools specifically for communities of practice, but I talk about them through my own context and experience which is mostly in communities of practice.

At first I thought it was crazy to be rewriting the procedure for some of these activities, when most of them are already on the internet. (See, in particular, the wiki with the Knowledge Sharing Toolkit).

Then it got me thinking about how people in organisations who are preparing an event rarely think in terms of process activities, let alone know the names of them. So how could they look them up?

 So here are 4 good reasons for sharing these tools in a pdf document rather than - or as well as a wiki:

1. So close and yet so far: Not everyone has free, easy access to internet. This increased access to internet is both true and a myth. It's true for some people some of the time. Outside that time you might be many kilometers away from a connection or you might have to pay, share a computer, or have a server with big downtime. You might be on the move or not allowed to access certain things at work.
2. A document in the hand is worth a wiki in the bush: each click as you navigate a wiki can take a long time if your connection is slow or bandwidth narrow. It's the same if you get many interruptions and lose track of where you are. It's frustrating to find unfinished pages ("put your story here") when it took you time and maybe money to find yourself on that page.
3. Keeping your options open. If the toolbox is in a pdf then you can share it online, and / or print it out to refer to and make notes on and keep it stored on your computer for when you don't have access to internet.