Web-based Learning Solutions for Communities of Practice

Supporting Communities of Practice by Advancing Knowledge Management
Figure 2. CoPe_it! Compendium icons conversion
involved in the experimentation. Then results of
the experimentation are presented and results of
the evaluation discussed.
An Hybrid Community of
Practice (HCoP): The Torre
Guaceto Community
The case study of Torre Guaceto is not about a
conventional environmental planning activity but
concerns the activities performed by a community
of farmers to enhance their biological production
income. A planning team was in charge of helping
this community of practice to build their past and
present project history. Therefore, Compendium
was used both to rebuild and represent the past
history of the community and to capture and
represent the new, ongoing activities. This case
study aims at testing the combined use of Compendium
and CoPe_it! to capture a deliberation
process in the ongoing phase and at testing new
way to support an hypermedia discourse which
happens in hybrid collaborative environments
(on-line and off-line).
We chose this case study because it was still
running; this gave us a good occasion to do some
live testing directly involving the Torre Guaceto
community members in real discussions. Furthermore
this case involved a real farming Community
of Practice, providing the opportunity to
investigate CoP activities outside an institutional
environment, where we could better appreciate
the differences and difficulties of working with
local communities, in their environments and
with their communication protocols. As previously
described Torre Guaceto case study is not
a conventional planning case, it is built around
a Community of Practice composed of heterogeneous
groups of stakeholders (a community of
farmers, NGOs, local agencies etc) that emerged
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