A Community normally forms around an art, a discipline, and it is the passion for that art that creates the loyalty and the organization. Of course, members drawn to the Community of Practice will be attracted for very personal reasons, and will each have a different perspective on the nature of the art that they are practicing. These different understandings will lead to a diversity of forms and practices which will lead inevitably to controversy. It is this controversy that must be both nurtured and resolved. Practitioners of an art must push its limits.
Art is exploration, and to do simply what is already known is to kill both the art and the artist.
An artist must reach into the unknown, must draw from other arts to enhance his own. As individual artists reach out in their own ways into the white space, they both make it known and bring themselves into the unknown. In mathematics, the explorer must defend her discoveries using proofs based on accepted theorems, axioms and other proofs. An architect must justify his work through forms, function and materials. A gardener must be able to explain and justify any exploration in terms of arrangement, soil, minerals, water, weather and a multitude of other factors that constitute the pattern language of the art of gardening.