Network Core

The Center’s Network Core focuses on building social networks that support knowledge flows – the information highways to and from researchers and stakeholders. The Center is experimenting with a strategy to connect these social networks through local and web-based communities of practice (CoP). CoP technologies are frequently used for the exchange of information among independent groups with similar interests.

Over the next year, two CoPs will be launched serving:

• Community provider agencies that deliver rehabilitation services to people with mental illnesses with a history of criminal justice involvement, and



• Organizations run by service consumers themselves and that focus on prison issues and/or reentry service delivery.

CoP participants may be engaged as advisors and reviewers of the Center’s research activities. The Center’s ability to forge and maintain strong academic-practice partnerships is described in two recently published articles by Drs. Wolff and Douglas Gerardi, Director, Office of Policy and Planning, New Jersey Department of Corrections:

Wolff, N., & Gerardi, D. (2007). Building evidence on best practice through corrections-academic partnerships: Getting to successful practice. Crime and Justice International, 23(May/June), 13-22.

Gerardi, D., & Wolff, N. (2008). Working together: A corrections-academic partnership that works. Equal Opportunities International, 27, 148-160.

Communities of practice facilitate the learning process by providing an environment for people with common concerns to think together and to share what they know, as well as an environment where they can acquire knowledge, efficiently and reliably, about common concerns.

"The things we have to learn before we do them, we learn by doing them."

- Aristotle

"Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly."

- Etienne Wenger

"Knowledge and learning have become the new strategic imperative of organizations… [and] networks and practice communities are the most natural and powerful resources for learning and knowledge."

- Verna Allee