Web-based Learning Solutions for Communities of Practice

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A Proposed Framework for Designing Sustainable Communities for Knowledge Management Systems
Design Recommendations
A community of practice is defined by the commonality
of an interest shared by its members.
Members of the community form communal
bonds, construct collective identities through communicative
action (Blanchard & Markus, 2004;
Donath, 1999; Postmes et al., 2000), and reach
common understanding (Habermas, 1984), thus
generating collaborative knowledge. The concept
of a community boundary is hence important and
delineates what a community is about, and what it
is not. In organizations, it is especially important
to make sure a community is ‘specialized’ or focused
on a particular topic in order to maximize
the signal 5 to noise ratio and minimize the costs
of obtaining relevant information 6 . Thus:
Each community in a KMS should have a central
focus which should be maintained throughout
the life of the community by ensuring that all
posts are relevant to the community’s focus.
As will be discussed in the ensuing recommendations,
a community manager, or a segmentation
strategy, could play a key role in ensuring a topical
focus. Jones and Rafaeli (2000) and Jones et al.
(2004) conclude that in order for a virtual community
to be sustainable, it has to have a topical
focus because otherwise members might experience
information overload, which is not tolerable
by their cognition capacity. They add that:
It logically follows that beyond a particular
communication processing-load, the behavioural
stress zones encountered will make group communication
unsustainable. (Jones & Rafaeli 2000,
p. 219)
Overall, the empirical findings support the assertion
that individual information-overload coping
strategies have an observable impact on mass
interaction discourse dynamics. Evidence was
found [that] users are more likely to end active
participation as the overloading of mass interaction
increases.(Jones et al. 2004, p. 206)
Two complementary concepts discussed
in literature are those of information overload
(Rogers & Agarwala-Rogers, 1975) and critical
mass (Licklider & Taylor, 1968; Markus, 1987).
Critical mass refers to the required group size
threshold for a sustainable community (Bieber
et al., 2002). Information overload results from
a higher number of messages, or messages that
are not sufficiently organized in a sensible, linked
structure, which makes it difficult for individuals
to process. While critical mass indicates that a
community that is too small will fail, information
overload suggests that one that is too big will also
fail. Hence, there is a maximum limit to the size
of a community beyond which a low signal to
noise ratio (Malhotra et al., 1997) and an upper
bound on an individual’s cognitive processing
limits (Jones, 1997) will render it unsuccessful.
This topic was the focus of studies conducted
specifically on membership limits of communities
(e.g., Jones & Rafaeli, 2000). While the limit
is context dependent and varies with the nature
of the community, a manager could determine
an approximate threshold for when information
overload or topical deviation occurs. When a community
grows too large, a segmentation strategy
can be employed to create an interrelated space
(Jones & Rafaeli, 2000). Hence:
There should be a maximum limit set for the
membership in the community in a KMS, beyond
which the community should be split into interrelated
sub-communities each with a central
focus or topic.
Jones and Rafaeli (2000) provide examples of
communities such as Amazon or Excite, in which
a segmentation strategy has been used to keep
the communities focused and prevent information
overload.