Communities of Practice in the Brussels Media Sector: Overview and Preliminary Trends

(eng) From show producers to VR enthusiasts, how do media workers share and develop new practices in Brussels? This report is aimed at providing an overview of existing communities of practice for media workers in Brussels. Based on interviews and on-site observations, the report offers insights that help understand the dynamics of the selected communities of practice and analyses them in a crosscutting approach, in order to find the leverage that could be useful for community organizers and decision makers to weigh in on the development of such initiatives, and therefore to support the Brussels media industry. The preliminary trends that emerge from this overview are the following. First, the communities of practice analysed in this report were created in specific contexts of new and fast-changing technological developments. Second, two main models can be clearly differentiated: the top-down approach, with the impetus coming from a public stakeholder and/or a domain-related institution in order to fulfil a specific need that has been identified, and the bottom-up approach, with the impetus usually coming from a personal initiative, which is the only structure to support the development of the community and has less access to resources. The communities seem to work as long as they are pertinent, respond to a need and bring added value to the target audience. Resources are a key element in developing a successful community or increasing its performance, whether it is human, financial, material or other types of resources (e.g. legitimacy, visibility, contact database). This report is the second deliverable of Work Package 6 on “Media workers as communities of practice”, which is handled by PReCoM (Centre for Research on Communication and Media) at Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles, as part of the Media Clusters Brussels research project (funded by Innoviris).