Web-based Learning Solutions for Communities of Practice

A Proposed Framework for Designing Sustainable Communities for Knowledge Management Systems
Segmentation strategy’ refers here to any systematic
method used to split discourse spaces
with the aim of creating a system of interrelated
virtual publics. As studies of usage show (e.g.,
Butler, 1999), virtual publics are not ‘scalable.’
Therefore, a ‘mega virtual public’ cannot be sustained.
Rather, virtual metropolises emerge from
the creation of a series of related virtual publics,
via the appropriate segmentation of discourse in
different related cyberspaces. In turn, the resulting
system of interconnected virtual publics encourages
the expansion of user populations, while
reducing the likelihood of overloaded virtual
public discourse. (p. 221)
Moderation has been studied in virtual community
literature (Markus, 2001). Human intervention
is considered necessary for tasks such
as maintaining community focus, preventing
‘trolling’ or ‘flaming’ (Malhotra et al., 1997),
encouraging participation (Preece et al., 2003),
and sanitizing data (Markus, 2001). Even though
trolling and flaming are unlikely in organizational
settings, moderation is required for the other
reasons. Since moderators (often referred to as
community or knowledge managers) are usually
employees with regular duties, it is important
that their work for the KM effort be recognized
and that they are allowed to devote time to the
community as part of their job (Davenport et al.,
1998; Silva et al., 2006). Hence:
Each community should have at least one
community manager with the authority and
resources to manage and act for the benefit of
the community.
The following remarks demonstrate the importance
of the role of a community manager
and the resources (e.g., people and time) that are
available to him or her.
Knowledge managers have content leads that evaluate
external knowledge resources and establish
pointers to the new resources for specific domains.
The searches are synthesized to allow higher level
of reuse. Knowledge researchers strongly support
sharing and reuse of knowledge probes: ‘The first
thing I do is go check that database to make sure
that no one hasn’t already pulled that information
before I go and start a whole new search.’ (Sherif
& Xing 2006, p. 538)
One person per project is in charge of posting
project deliverables onto the repository … On a
weekly basis the knowledge manager goes in and
makes sure it has been categorized correctly and
the document has been zipped. He just makes sure
it has been submitted according to all the standards
and guidelines. (Sherif & Xing 2006, p. 536)
As seen in the following, lack of sufficient
resources such as time can adversely affect the
quality of community manager’s job.
With the amount of time available to produce high
quality and sanitized knowledge for dissemination
… It’s not even just writing it … I’m on the review
committee and that’s where a lot of time is as I’ve
got to review every document … The delay in implementing
this second knowledge dissemination
plan was due to … the lack of resources to provide
high quality, sanitized knowledge for consumption
by customers. (Markus, 2001, p. 80)
Research on information overload posits that
information should be organized hierarchically
in order to place new information in the correct
context quickly. Also, costs of obtaining new
knowledge are lower when messages are simple
and contextually relevant (Jones et al., 2004).
Blogs, wikis, and net forums use chronological
and topical organizing successfully to map information.
Site maps on websites provide a graphical
view of how information is arranged, reducing the
time and effort required to access it while also
providing an overall picture of the Web site. More
recent work on the semantic Web enables tagging
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