Communities of Practice

1
TOPIC Knowledge Networks Communities

Included
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
Communities of Practice Communities of
Interest Internal Public sector communities
Internal corporates Supply Chain communities
SMEs Virtual Organisations Organic and created
communities Modelling knowledge structures and
relationships Sociotechnical/Cultural
aspects Impacts and benefits of
communities Lifecycle of Communities The role of
technological support for communities

• Research Framework Models (How to develop a
  theory of
• communities?)
• Is there a typology of Communities?
• Methodologies for community creation/maintenance/s
  upport
• What are key community roles amd topologies?
• Benefits of competition vs cooperation?
• How to identify and exploit key technology
  enablers?
• What conditions promote knowledge sharing?
• How to map technologies to community types?
• What are the economics of knowledge networks?
• What are the sociotechnical issues?
• What about cost-benefit analysis?
• Is there a need for large scale, longitudinal
  studies?
• Are there relevant theories of organistional
  learning and/or can they be develoepd?

• Teams (existing organisational structures)
• Task-oriented groups (in contrast to practice- or
  interest-oriented)
• Technological infrastructure (hardware etc)

• OnToKnowledge
• MILK MESMUSES
• Hyperknowledge
• OntoWeb
• Vision ROCKET C-WEB
• EKMF/ Knowledge Board
• WICKIPEDIAOPAL
• Enter
• COCONET
• ShareNet
• COMMA
• CORMA
• PRISMA

• Multinational communities
• IPR and privacy issues
• The ignorance problem
• Geographical separation
• Highly multidisciplinary area
• Very broad area
• Theres no algorithm for community
• Community evolution
• The danger of buzzwords/being a hot topic
• Context Dependence
• Is KM in 6FP (as differntiated from Knowledge
  Technologies)???

Key Challenges
Supporting Projects