Web-based Learning Solutions for Communities of Practice

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A Proposed Framework for Designing Sustainable Communities for Knowledge Management Systems
directories are often an integral part of KMS and
serve as transactive memory systems to identify
‘who knows what’ in the organization (Argote &
Ingram, 2000). If an employee knows exactly who
to ask a particular question from, he/she should
be able to contact the expert directly, and in the
absence of the knowledge, the member can rely
on the community to help arrive at an answer.
Since members in a KMS can belong to multiple
communities, these features apply to the entire
system. This discussion leads to the following
design recommendations:
The KMS should have the facility to maintain
member profiles that indicate the number of
posts, other member links, replies, and usage
history of a member.
Members should be able to connect to other
members directly through tools such as instant
messaging as well as indirectly through forums
and directories.
The user profile contains compulsory and optional
information that a member provides upon registration.
If a member of the community publishes a
contribution or asks a question, the contributor’s
name is shown as a hyperlink. By clicking on
this hyperlink, one obtains the user profile of the
corresponding member. The extent of information
other members see on the user profile depends on
the level of anonymity the member has chosen.
(Leimeister et al. 2005, p. 110)
In the remark below, Barab et al. (2003) discuss
the importance of profiles in a community
of practice called ILF 7 .
In fact, the ILF encourages its members to create
and edit their member profiles so other ILF
members can learn more about one another. This
enables ILF members to control how they are
perceived by others within the community, and
ideally, these profiles help ILF members to decide
who they want to communicate with and how they
might interpret statements or attitudes of others.
(Barab et al., 2003, p. 248)
Though social identity theory discourages
anonymity, literature in MIS (especially in research
on group decision support systems) has
found anonymity to aid participation. However,
an employee’s trust in the content obtained from
a KMS would be weaker if it were anonymous
(Donath, 1999). Making authorship explicit
adds legitimacy to the information. Literature
in philosophy also discusses the importance of
credentials in reliability on others for information
(Hardwig, 1991). In addition, this makes
the author responsible for making sure that the
information he/she puts up is not erroneous. Investigating
different levels of anonymity (such
as using nicknames or real names) would be an
interesting line of enquiry, as well.
Submissions to a KMS should not be anonymous.
The following statement supports this guideline.
An interesting metric developed by the specialists
to assess data quality was their use of incident
authorship as an indicator of quality. Each incident
that is entered is automatically assigned a unique
number, which includes a code identifying the
particular specialist who entered it … You tend
to evaluate information differently from different
people. So if you see 40 items from a search you
go to the incidents of those folks you’ve gotten
good information from in the past … I know that
Arthur has a reputation for writing shorts novels
as resolutions. I mean, he’s a wonderful source
of information … So when I get an incident from
him, I’m very comfortable with that information.
Whereas, some of the other people in the department
will put in one or two sentence resolutions.
And it tends to make it a little vaguer and more