Paper long abstract:

In order for any community to emerge or be cultivated, associations have to be made. Yet, forming associations is not an easy task as they are never introduced into an 'empty world' (Mol 2010); other linkages always already exist. Hence a community may only be configured through associations that are knit in favourable ways across a multitude of heterogeneous entities (such as people, practices, ideas, tools and technologies) and, in doing so, replace existing ones (Latour 1988). This paper investigates how—and in which ways—membership and communal knowledge is configured, by looking at the ordering and configuration of a Web-based community as a performance of associations.

The research is based on a three year ethnographic study of ePractice: a large-scale, Web-based European Commission initiative that was meant to be(come) a European 'community of practice' for eGovernment. As such, 'community of practice' was not used as an analytical concept (e.g. Lave & Wenger 1991), but rather as a prescriptive term that designated a desirable objective. The paper argues that membership is not solely being performed through participation in a work or knowledge practice, but through the producing and consuming of community accounts and their continuous (re)configuration. In doing so, the notion of configuration draws attention to the 'imaginaries' and 'materialities' that technologies 'join together' (Suchman 2012) and to the 'agential cuts' (Barad 2007) that intra-actively produce community, its members and knowledge. The organisation of togetherness is reflected in the way these cuts are enacted.