Tackling Acceptability Issues in Communities of Practice by Providing a Lightweight Email-Based Interface to Social Software

In the framework of the PALETTE European research project, the Swiss federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) is designing and experimenting with eLogbook, a Web-based collaborative environment designed for communities of practice. It enables users to manage joint activities, share related assets and get contextual awareness. In addition to the original Web-based access, an email-based eLogbook interface is developed. The purpose of this lightweight interface is twofold. First, it eases eLogbook access when using smart phones or PDA. Second, it eases eLogbook acceptance for community members hesitating to learn an additional Web environment. Thanks to the proposed interface, members of a community can benefit from the ease of use of an email client combined with the power of an activity and asset management system without burden. The Web-based eLogbook access can be kept for supporting further community evolutions, when participation becomes more regular and activities become more complex. This chapter presents the motivation, the design and the incentives of the emailbased eLogbook interface.

A Document Reuse Tool for Communities of Practice

Virtual communities of practice are gaining importance as mean of sharing and exchanging knowledge. In such environments, information reuse is of major concern. In this paper, the authors outline the importance of structuring documents in order to facilitate the reuse of their content. They show how explicit structure representation facilitates the understanding of the original documents and helps considerably in automating the reuse process. The authors propose two main tools: the first performs automatic structure transformation using matching techniques and the second performs structure and instances evolution in a transparent and an automatic manner.

From ‘Collecting' to ‘Deciding'

Current tools aiming at supporting argumentative collaboration either provide means to successfully tame wicked problems or offer advanced reasoning mechanisms to facilitate decision making creating a gap in today’s landscape of systems supporting argumentative collaboration. The consequences of this gap are in particular severe for communities of practice when they have to employ tools from both sides to support their collaboration needs. The authors argue that a key factor in bridging this gap is viewing argumentative collaboration as an emergent phenomenon. Proper support of the emergent aspects of argumentative collaboration would benefit systems supporting argumentative collaboration as this would enable those systems to support the evolution of the entire collaboration at different levels. The authors describe how such approach has been implemented in CoPe_it! a prototype argumentative collaboration support system. In CoPe_it!, an incremental formalization approach facilitates the emergence of individual and loosely coupled resources into coherent knowledge structures and finally decisions.

Individual Learning and Emotional Characteristics in Web-based Communities of Practice

The knowledge management paradigm of communities of practice can be efficiently realized in Web-based environments, especially if one considers the extended social networks that have proliferated within the Internet. In terms of increasing performance through the exchange of knowledge and shared learning, individual characteristics, such as learners’ preferences that relate to group working, may be of high importance. These preferences have been summarized in cognitive and learning styles typologies, as well as emotional characteristics which define implications that could serve as personalization guidelines for designing collaborative learning environments. This chapter discusses the theoretical assumptions of two distinct families of learning style models, cognitive personality and information processing styles (according to Curry’s onion model), and the role of affection and emotion, in order to explore the possibilities of personalization at the group level of CoP.

Mining Unnoticed Knowledge in Collaboration Support Systems

Numerous tools aiming at facilitating or enhancing collaboration among members of diverse communities have been already deployed and tested over the Web. Focusing on the particularities of online communities of practice (CoPs), this chapter introduces a framework for mining knowledge that is hidden in such settings. The authors’ motivation stems from the criticism that contemporary tools receive regarding lack of active participation and limited engagement in their use, which is partially due to the inability of identifying and exploiting a set of important relationships among community members and the associated collaboration-related assets. The authors’ overall approach elaborates and integrates issues from the data mining and the social networking disciplines. More specifically, the proposed framework enables CoPs members to rank the contributions of their peers towards identifying meaningful relationships, as well as valuable information about roles and competences. In the context of this chapter, the authors first model the characteristics of the overall collaboration setting and propose a set of associated metrics. Next, in order to reveal unnoticed knowledge which resides within CoPs, a data mining technique that groups users into clusters and applies advanced social networking analysis on them is proposed. Finally, the authors discuss the benefits of their approach and conclude with future work plans.

Using Graphs in Developing Educational Material

Distance learning institutions need to find a way to transplant the benefits of conventional tutoring practices into the development of digital content that is conducive to students’ learning needs. Therein lie two great challenges: promote real distance learning effectively and, at the same time, try to accommodate the ability of students to learn via collaboration. The authors have proposed the development of learner’s open-and-distance-learning (ODL) courses as both a theoretical model and an applied methodology to be one of their key priorities and describe how this concept co-evolves with Web mining and institutional infrastructures to address the needs of emergent communities of practice within their university, primarily of students and secondarily of tutors.

Supporting Communities of Practice by Advancing Knowledge Management between Hybrid Collaborative Environments

In this chapter the authors investigate a tool integration perspective to support knowledge management and exchange between Web-based and traditional collaborative environments. In particular they discuss the integration between a tool (CoPe_it!) supporting collaborative argumentation and learning in Webbased communities of practices and a hypermedia and sense making tool (Compendium) acting as a personal and collective knowledge management (KM) system in traditional collaborative environments. The authors describe the tools and drive a comparative analysis of the two groupware by focusing on the general applicability of the tools integration for supporting communities of practices and, more generally, collaborative works. Moreover the authors present the results of a case study in which the tools integration has been applied within a real community of practice. Finally they discuss main results of the tools integration in order to leverage communities of practice to a truly collaborative environment with no communication boundaries.

The IntelCities Community of Practice

The chapter examines the IntelCities Community of Practice (CoP) supporting the development of the organization’s e-Learning platform, knowledge management system (KMS) and digital library for eGov services. It begins by outlining the IntelCities CoP and goes on to set out the integrated model of electronically enhanced government (eGov) services developed by the CoP to meet the front-end needs, middleware requirements and back-office commitments of the IntelCities e-Learning platform, KMS and digital library. The chapter goes on to examine the information technology (IT) adopted by the CoP to develop the IntelCities e-Learning platform, KMS and digital library as a set of semanticallyinteroperable eGov services supporting the crime, safety and security initiatives of socially-inclusive and participatory urban regeneration programs.

An Agent System to Manage Knowledge in CoPs

This paper proposes a multi-agent architecture and a trust model with which to foster the reuse of information in organizations which use knowledge bases or knowledge management systems. The architecture and the model have been designed with the goal of giving support to communities of practices which are a means of sharing knowledge. However, members of these communities are currently often geographically distributed, and less trust therefore exists among members than in traditional co-localizated communities of practice. This situation has led us to propose our trust model, which can be used to calculate what piece of knowledge is more trustworthy. The architecture’s artificial agents will use this model to recommend the most appropriate knowledge to the community’s members.

A Proposed Framework for Designing Sustainable Communities for Knowledge Management Systems

Despite considerable academic and practitioner interest in knowledge management, success of knowledge management systems is elusive. This chapter provides a framework which suggests that KM success can be achieved by designing sustainable communities of practice. Communities of practice have proven to have significant economic and practical implications on organizational practices. A growing body of literature in KM recognizes the importance of communities that foster collaborative learning in organizations and almost all KMS have a ‘network’ component that facilitates connecting people in communities of practice. Evidence has shown that communities have been a key element in KMS of many companies including Xerox PARC, British Petroleum Co., Shell Oil Company, Halliburton, IBM, Proctor and Gamble, and Hewlett Packard.