A quick introduction to what a “Community of Practice is”
“A CoP is a group of people who share a common concern, a set of problems, or an interest in a topic and who come together to fulfil both individual and group goals”. In evidence synthesis CoPs are vital for sharing expertise, sharing experience, and developing new methods, tools and frameworks, for rigorous evidence synthesis. CoPs can be both within (e.g. https://www.cochrane.no/nb) and cross-disciplinary (e.g. http://www.gesiinitiative.com ), focusing on the entire evidence-informed decision-making process (e.g. https://jbi.global/) or on specific components of the process (e.g. https://www.eshackathon.org/). Evidence synthesis methodologies are discipline agnostic and therefore we can learn a lot from the experience of other fields.