Spontaneous or intentional
Most of the Communities of practice begins without any intervention or the development effort from the organisation. The members spontaneously join together because they will need each other as peers and also learning partners. But in other cases the organisations may have to intentionally develop particular communities to steward a required capability. The level of formality is not dictated by the way the communities are formed which could be spontaneous or intentional. Some of the highly active and mature communities will remain informal while others are highly structured which is done by calling the meetings , setting the agendas, defining the particular roles and also creating the community artifacts like the websites or knowledge bases.