Communities of practice is a concept every social computing practitioners should know. Developed in UC Irvine in the 90s, it describes an ecology of professionals sustaining and producing knowledge within a local organizational environment. Companies once believed that knowledge could be stored in documents and hard drives. Community of practice says that knowledge can only be kept within social communities, through a system of social norms and practices. Many companies now nurture corporate groups to sustain high level of professional practices.

Between the 90s and now, social media has quickly emerged as pervasive technologies that are changing our work and life. Social media like Twitter and video conferencing are being adopted rapidly across companies and educational settings. The StarCraft gaming community, with a large population of members sustaining knowledge through an assemblage of social media tools, may provide an insight into the next stage of development of community of practice.

Starcraft is a game that requires much knowledge to play well. StarCraft is not like a Super Mario game, that attempts to solve a premade puzzle. The challenge in StarCraft keeps shifting throughout a play session, making it approximating a real world problem. Players have to manage an economy, build production facilities, and manage an army; and all these can be done in a myriad of combinations. Also, a player's opponent is not a pre-programmed A.I., but another human player. Each player, attempting to create an army that has a marginal advantage against his opponent, therefore incessantly reacting to what his opponent does, plays out a game that can never be scripted but is as fluid as we can possibly imaging!

The nature of knowledge in StarCraft makes it an ideal context to study knowledge production through social media. Community of practice is developed in a context where knowledge production is primarily in-house. Companies nurture their own communities of practice, but do not deal with outside agents, e.g., the user communities. However, we cannot overlook the fact that most software innovations do come from users. With social media, linking corporate teams to user communities become much easier than before. StarCraft demonstrated a model for knowledge production supported by social media technologies.

The StarCraft community is connected by many technologies including Facebook, twitter, email, online forums, Skype, and vods. Each technology has its own purposes, while many purposes also overlap. Apart from being connected digitally, community members organize local events like LAN parties, and watching games in bars. Players also link up with other payers, many times through local events, to form practice partnerships. Many top players share vods to showcase how they played the game, allowing common players to learn from them.

One of the most defining features of the StarCraft scene are the international tournaments, where the best players across the globe pitting their strategies against one another. At these multidays events, new knowledge paradigms get defined and legitimized by the player community.

The way which knowledge can developed in StarCraft makes this an exciting context for examining knowledge production in the digital age. It may well reveal a thing or two about the future of corporate knowledge practices.