This paper offers an overview of the emerging domain of mobile governance as an offspring of the broader landscape of e-governance. Mobile governance initiatives have been deployed everywhere in parallel to the development of crowdsourced, open source software applications that facilitate the collection, aggregation, and dissemination of both information and data coming from different sources: citizens, organizations, public bodies, etc. Ultimately, mobile governance can be seen as a tool to promote the rule of law from a decentralized, distributed, and bottom-up perspective.
Several of the Communities of Practices (CoP) Alterra/Wing manages have reached their mid-life. Designed CoPs have come to life and have achieved alignment, from which we can learn. A growing interest can be signalised in using CoPs as management instruments and in governance. Governments are seeking new ways in policy making and new steering instruments. Using the case of agrologistics we describe how the Dutch government has used a CoP for complex planning and organizational problems. The social design, planning and management of a new CoP have linked together a wide range of stakeholders to establish a operational CoP. Alignment is a key factor in this transition to self-steering; the value of belonging is very powerful. Masters play an important role in setting up and in steering the CoP. CoPs can be developed as new instruments of governance, based on the theoretical concept of CoP.