CONCEPT
Broker
A person who belongs to multiple communities of practice and carries not just information but perspective across their boundaries — a role Wenger identified as constitutive of healthy constellations, and one AI is now eroding.
Brokers are practitioners whose multimembership in several communities of practice gives them the capacity to translate, synthesize, and integrate across practices that would otherwise remain siloed. The project manager who has spent enough time with both designers and engineers to understand what each community values. The product manager who sits in design reviews and code reviews on the same day and sees connections the communities themselves miss. The technical writer whose craft includes carrying engineering perspective into user documentation and user perspective back into engineering. The broker's value is not merely translational — it is integrative. She carries not just information across boundaries but the sensibilities, priorities, and ways of seeing that characterize each community. When AI handles the translation, the informational function is automated; the integrative function dissolves.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Brokering requires multimembership, and multimembership requires time — years of sustained participation in multiple communities, developing enough standing in each to be recognized as a