10 Practices for Building a Learning Organization: Community

The 10 Practices of Intré’s Learning Organization

Intré’s Learning Organization model is a constantly evolving framework focused on skill development and the professional growth of its people. It fosters a collaborative learning environment through targeted practices, encouraging both individual and collective initiative to ensure ongoing training and active engagement within the organization. Intré’s current learning initiative includes ten key practices:

1. Guilds
2. Camp
3. Community
4. Skill matrix
5. Certifications
6. Academy
7. CoP I Wanna Be A Speaker
8. Learning goals
9. Classroom training
10. Language courses

What does “Community” mean to Intré? What areas does it cover? What does it look like in practice? How does it fit into Intré’s Learning Organization model? You’ll find the answers in the next paragraphs.

Understanding the Value of Community

To grasp the importance of Community for Intré, it’s essential to consider two key points:

1. The company is a social space, an ecosystem where people meet, interact, and grow together. Even though the work is “technical,” human interaction and relationships are crucial for both individual and organizational growth.
2. Outside the company, there is a greater flow of information than inside. Achieving technical excellence therefore requires going beyond corporate boundaries and encouraging knowledge exchange.

The Five Dimensions of Community at Intré

Within the Learning Organization model embraced by Intré—and by the Business Units established in recent years such as Betrusted and Memoria—the Community is not merely a training tool, but a true ecosystem for continuous growth and knowledge exchange. Actively engaging in relevant Communities—focused on software development, AI, cybersecurity, UX design, and agile practices—enables individuals to gain insights, develop skills, and foster a strong sense of belonging, both within the company and the broader industry.

At Intré, people can experience the Community through five distinct dimensions:

• Spectator, attending events to learn and engage in discussions;
• Speaker, contributing with knowledge and expertise;
• Organizer, helping to manage and develop community events;
• Facilitator, launching new Communities and supporting their growth;
• Financial Supporter, investing resources to nurture the value generated by the Communities.

This approach transforms knowledge into a driver of ongoing innovation, creating an environment where ideas are shared, valued, and constantly evolving.

Experiencing the Community as an Attendee: Learning to Grow

Attending Community events is a valuable opportunity for individual professional growth, as it helps expand knowledge and spark new ideas. At the same time, having team members join conferences is also a strategic opportunity for the company, especially for consulting firms like Intré. It’s one of the most effective ways to stay up to date with industry trends and foster innovation within the organization.

In Intré’s Learning Organization model, engaging with the Community as an attendee is a key part of our culture. That’s why every year the company offers three days off and a dedicated budget to allow people to dive into conferences, meetups, and workshops.

Why do we do it?
Learning doesn’t stop at the boundaries of the organization—innovation requires awareness of what’s happening around us. Listening to experts, discovering new technologies, and exchanging ideas with other professionals helps us bring fresh perspectives and practical solutions into our daily work. Participating means opening a window to the future and contributing to collective growth.

Living the Community as a Speaker: Sharing to Grow

Being a speaker in a Community is not just an opportunity to gain visibility, but also a way to give back. Every experience gained, every lesson learned only becomes truly valuable when it is shared. That’s why, in our company, speaking at industry events is an essential part of our Learning Organization mindset.

We believe in the principle of giving back: contributing to collective knowledge enriches not only the audience but the speaker as well. Preparing a talk means diving deeper, organizing, and reworking one’s knowledge—turning learning into an active, continuous process. It’s also a way to support the growth of our industry and build genuine connections with professionals who share our vision.

Why do we do it?
Teaching others allows us to return the value we’ve received while learning something new in the process.

The Importance of Being Part of a Community

Joining a Community isn’t just about passive learning — it means actively contributing to its growth and continuity. For Intré, where learning is a core value, engaging with communities is a way to give back (as mentioned in the previous paragraph) on a more organizational level: by supporting events, sharing knowledge, and helping to create sustainable spaces for collaboration over time. This commitment isn’t merely altruistic — it’s a deliberate strategy. A thriving, well-structured Community fosters innovation, spreads expertise, and builds connections that benefit both individual professionals and the broader tech ecosystem.

Why do we do it?
We believe that investing in communities means investing in the future of our industry.

Engaging a Community: Creating Connections, Generating Value

For a Community to grow and generate value, it needs to be nurtured. This means creating opportunities for interaction, fostering dialogue, and providing spaces—both physical and digital—where people can share knowledge and experiences. This is what we do by supporting organizations like XPUG Bergamo, offering places where technical discussions can thrive, and nurturing internal Communities of Practice (CoPs) like I Wanna Be A Speaker, a support and growth environment designed for anyone who wants to propose themselves as a speaker at a conference or event. The CoP I Wanna Be A Speaker is part of the 10 practices of the Learning Organization Intré, and as such, it deserves an in-depth article, which you can find on the Intré blog. Our Intré Camp – here is the story of one of our Camps – also open to external guests, is a concrete example of how a company Community can transform into a collective learning lab.

Intré is active in various communities, from DDD Open with Alberto Acerbis to CoderDojo Barlassina with Andrea Sironi and Matteo Balestrini, as well as the Italian Agile Movement with, among others, Fabio Ghislandi and Alessandro Giardina.

Why do we do it?
Sharing knowledge is not only a value, but a driving force for innovation. We do it to learn, to grow, and to build the future of software together.

Investing in the Community: A Driver for Growth and Innovation

Supporting a Community goes beyond participation or content contributions — it means making tangible investments in the resources that sustain and grow it. Events, physical or virtual spaces, collaboration tools, and scholarships for speakers and organizers all require financial commitment. This shouldn’t be seen as a cost, but as a strategic investment. Funding a Community means recognizing the value of knowledge sharing and helping create a fertile ecosystem where innovation and skills can thrive.

Why do we do it?
A strong Community fuels continuous learning and strengthens the entire industry.

Intré’s Contribution to the Community Over the Years

We have always believed in the value of sharing and collective growth. Since 2016, Intré has been actively contributing to the tech and Agile community by organizing a structured framework to participate as an audience, speakers, organizers, and sponsors at major industry events. This commitment was further strengthened with the establishment of the I Wanna Be A Speaker Community of Practice, an initiative that has revitalized our presence, supporting those who want to challenge themselves and spread knowledge.

Conclusions

Investing in the Community is not only a way to contribute to collective growth but also a powerful strategy for professional development. The pursuit of excellence involves interaction, sharing, and active participation: events, conferences, and moments of exchange generate new knowledge, which we can internalize and then give back to the Community. This virtuous cycle is the core of the Learning Organization: we learn from others, apply what we discover, and in turn, enrich the common knowledge. But above all, the Community addresses a concrete need of ours: finding external stimuli, solutions, and perspectives that we might not have considered on our own. And this is precisely why give back becomes natural—because the growth of everyone is also our growth.