This paper has two objectives.  The first is to report on a pilot study of knowledge sharing in what was described a global on-line Community of Practice, however in order to do so, it will also need to address some of the conceptual issues associated with the study of Communities of Practice in general and on-line Communities of Practice in particular.  This forms the second objective.

The Community of Practice in our study was intentionally created to share knowledge between product engineers and marketing managers in a large multinational organization.  Most of the members of this community have only ever met in 'virtual meetings' co-ordinated from the company's HQ in France; although the focus of their practice (a sub-set of the products of the company) is firmly part of the physical world, the Community itself exists almost entirely on-line.  Our goal was to improve our understanding of this community in order to be able to undertake more focused studies in the future.

Although we had the full support of the company, the response to our request for interview was poor.  The results section of this paper is therefore somewhat general in nature.  The conclusions focus on a set of questions that could form the basis for a further study of this community of inform other studies of similar communities.