The first part of this paper, From fishermen guilds to the global village, posited that the evolution of the technical and socioeconomic environment has changed some roles within the realities known as “communities of practice” (CoPs), and introduced new aspects, to the extent that the original formulation of the model no longer fits the prevalent form of the phenomenon.

The “practice”, the “domain” and even the “community” need to be redefined to fit observable reality; ownership and participation issues take center stage. The paper concluded that those changes have redefined the “community”, as simply a core among other cores within a themed “conversational space”, a group of collaborating people bound by a specific “culture”, that make use of a specific technological “resource” for storing and transmitting information.

While the paper touched on some of the new ownership and management issues facing these communities, many more angles were not explored. Several friends (and a number of respected practitioners at com-prac) have made comments centered on the paper’s view of “lurkers”, and the role of ownership. Lurkers are the people who inhabit the silent (or almost ), heavily populated fringes of communities: the people who listen in but don't speak up, who read but don't answer, or who once in a lifetime post a single question. Their role has often been confused with that of the “legitimate peripheral participant”, which is itself not well defined in the original CoP literature by Lave, Wenger et al., and has just as frequently been derided as parasitic or lauded as indirectly beneficial. These oft-mentioned and much-debated fixtures of CoPs lack a coherent, satisfactory description in any model, and specifically lack one that fits with the view we're developing here: one that takes into account not just process but motivation.

We will strive to fill in the picture by exploring four facets of CoPs:

- Communities as social institutions: nature, emergence, evolution, membership and legitimacy.

- Motivation and participation: the value of knowledge for community stakeholders, and the fairness issue.

- The role of owners and the shape of CoPs: intellectual property, leadership, exploitation and appreciation.

- Lurking: legitimacy, identity and values; users, dabblers and parasites.

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