Computer-Supported Communities of Practice - CiteSeerX

Computer-Supported Communities of Practice David R. Millen and Michael J. Muller IBM Research 1 Rogers St. Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142 USA {David_R_Millen, Michael_Muller}@lotus.com One type of delimited community that has attracted increasing interest in both management science research and commercial offerings is called a community of practice. Briefly, communities of practice are often described as diffuse, largely voluntary social networks that exist horizontally in organizations or associations. Their members work on their own individual projects or teams, and have few recognizable shared goals. However, the members of a community of practice have common methods, procedures, and knowledge, and have a need to share information, resources, and exp ertise with one another. Communities of practice have been theorized as sites of exchange of perspectives and information, and of mutual learning. Communities of practice have also been described as crucial resources for the success of knowledge-dependent organizations. For many (possibly all?) communities of practice, knowledge-sharing takes place in both the physical as well as the virtual worlds.1 For example, in a multi-year study of one community of practice (journalists), there were frequent online discussions about the annual conference, regional group meetings, and various face-to-face seminars (Millen and Dray, 2000). In a study of designers within a corporation, we found local face-to-face gatherings and design reviews, as well as email coordination of design classes and generalized question-and-answer interactions (Muller and Carey, 2001). More general support for this claim comes from a project underway to model the economic value of communities of practice (Millen and Costanzo, unpublished data). As part of that research, we examined in detail the financial records of 157 professional associations, which are arguably good examples of “extranet” distributed communities of practice. The financial records revealed that on average 22 percent of the professional association’s budget was used to support conferences and other face-to-face gatherings. While there was considerable variation in the budget allocated to conferences, it is reasonable to conclude that face-to-face meetings remain an important venue for knowledge exchange among practitioners. At the same time, there is also an increasing interest in constructing electronic spaces to support communities of practice. While many of the electronic spaces are private and not visible, in most cases, there are public web sites for professional associations. To better understand the kinds of activities supported online, a content analysis of 82 of the associations that we analyzed earlier was completed. Almost all of the sites provided general information about the association, including listings of events, membership information, and publications. Somewhat surprisingly, only 37 percent of the associations had visible support for online discussions. The number of online discussions, however, may have been undercounted, as many discussion groups are found in areas visible only to association members. Nevertheless, the growing importance of online discussion is clear as the number of associations that supported member conversations has increased 17 percent when compared with a similar survey conducted two years ago (Millen, 2000). Moreover, there are informal or formal organizational architectures that can be quite different. Many professional associations maintain local chapters. Each local chapter may have face-to-face meetings and/or on-line discussion opportunities. The people who participate in local events may or may not attend the larger association events. The people who are in leadership roles in local chapters may or may not have 1

McDermott (1999/2001) makes a distinction between public and private community spaces, where public spaces include “Meetings, website, telecons” and private spaces include “Person to person: Phone, email, f2f.” While we are intrigued by his proposed analytic dimension, we are also troubled by his analysis. For example, some meetings and teleconferences are for private subsets of community members, and are therefore not “public.” Similarly, some communities, such as Systers, use email distribution lists as their primary means of communication: The email is not “private,” as McDermott’s analysis claims. Thus, while the public/private dimension appears useful, we think that different communities may use different “mappings” of public and private onto specific communication modalities.

leadership roles in the larger association. Thus, the question of site of activity becomes a series of partially interlinked questions that cut across venue of interaction, size/scope of community (or subcommunity), and potentially multiple roles of each of the individual participants. When we study communities of practice within companies, we find similar complex patterns. The Lotus design community, for example, is loosely connected through an on-line distribution list, a series of events that have both a physical component (face-to-face presentations) and an electronic component (remote participation in the presentations and stored presentations materials), and (as of July 2001) a shared repository for design materials and discussions (Muller, 2000; Muller and Carey, 2001). In addition to these deliberate interventions, a minority of the designers are also organizationally grouped together into three groups; the larger number of designers work independently of one another, and have informal networks from past co-assignments; and visits by outsiders often have the unintended result of introducing designers who have never met within the company, but who happen to have professional relationships with the same outside visitor. Thus, we find some similarities between the structures of association communities of practice studied by Miller and Costanzo, and the particular company community of practice studied by Muller and Carey: •

One large community of practice, with •

Formal (conference, speaker series, group meetings) and informal (chapter, prior coassignment) physical sites of interaction

•

Formal (distribution lists) and informal (on-line discussions and instant messages) virtual sites of interaction

•

Varied participation in each venue

•

Potentially different roles in each venue

The care and feeding of a community of practice requires the help of many individuals performing a variety of roles. Several studies have identified various roles that appear to be important in nurturing a COP. In a study of 13 organizations in six industries, researchers identified three main roles: stewards, who capture and codify tacit knowledge; researchers, who search, retrieve, and deliver knowledge; and brokers, who connect knowledge seekers with sources (Horvath, Sasson, Sharon, and Parker, 2000). McDermott (1999/2001) identified five “leadership roles:” community leader, thought leader (technical “guru”), knowledge miner, subject matter expert, and core group member. Fontaine (2001) described ten roles, including leader, sponsor, facilitator, content coordinator, subject matter expert, and several categories of members. Kim (2000) identified seven important roles, including hosts, who keep community activities running smoothly; greeters, who welcome new members; and event coordinators, who plan and run major or recurring events. Muller (2000), in a study of secondary sources from twenty corporate knowledge organizations, found evidence for roles of gatekeepers (looking inside the organization and looking outside the organization), authorities (people who reviewed and vetted knowledge before distributing it to organizations), lay knowledge originators, and knowledge users. Preceding the current focus on communities, Ehrlich and Cash (1994) studied a group of customer support workers and found the existence of an information mediator, someone who has a great breadth of knowledge and great troubleshooting skills. Blomberg, Suchman, and Trigg (1997) found a similar role for a knowledgeable intermediary in an ethnographic study of a law office; see also Nardi and O’Day (1996, 1999) for the value contributed by intermediaries in reference libraries. Roles in association-based communities of practice appear to depend upon the venue of interaction (e.g., physical vs. virtual). Here are two relatively obvious examples: association officers tend to be more powerful in face-to-face meetings; webmasters or discussion-group moderators tend to be more powerful in on-line settings. However, this simple differentiation is actually more complicated, for several reasons: •

There is often explicit reference made from physical to virtual, and back.

•

There are specialized on-line discussion groups in which rank in the organization does matter

•

There are face-to-face events at conferences which are organized and chaired by discussion-group moderators

Thus, the physical and virtual sites interact powerfully and subtly in terms of their influence on the roles and identities of their participants.

Several roles in communities of practice appear to be nearly universal: •

a mediator-authority who interprets knowledge (and, sometimes, knowledge structures such as taxonomies) to other community members

•

an expert with the responsibility to identify, categorize, and reify those items that the organization treats as knowledge

•

“consumers” or “users” of the community knowledge, who may or may not themselves contribute directly to that knowledge (note that there are powerful arguments regarding the valuable roles that are played by “peripheral” or “non-public” participants – respectively, Lave and Wenger, 1991; McDermott, 1999/2001; Nonnecke and Preece, 2000)

Some communities may officially recognize additional, less information-centric roles, such as leader, greeter, host, and facilitator (Kim, 2000; McDermott, 1999/2001). Other communities may treat these roles more implicitly. These observations suggest that, for each of the communities we have studied, there may be a unitary community (perhaps including subcommunities) with one or more physical venues and one or more virtual venues. Our interests are beginning to shift away from categorizing communities by medium of interaction, and toward questions such as how communities of practice can be supported by electronic environments in addition to physical environments. We are interested in discussing the ways in which knowledge and authority flow between the physical interactions and the online environments. And finally, we are interested in comparing the roles supporting physical communities of practice with the roles that are necessary to support online the online interaction and knowledge sharing, and in the fluidity in roles that occurs as members of the community navigate among the diversity of physical and on-line venues. References

Blomberg, Jeanette, Suchman, Lucy and Trigg, Randall 1997. Back to Work: Renewing Old Agendas for Cooperative Design. In M. Kyng and L. Matthiessen (Eds.) Computers and Design in Context. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 268-287. Ehrlich, K. and Cash, D., (1994) Turning Information into Knowledge: Information Finding as a Collaborative Activity. Proceedings of Digital Libraries 1994 Conference. College Station, Texas.. Fontaine, M. (2001). Research report and toolkit: Understanding, identifying and selecting the roles needed to staff and support communities of practice. Cambridge MA USA: IBM Institute for Knowledge Management. Horvath, J., Sasson, L., Sharon, J., & Parker, A. (2000), Intermediaries: A Study of Knowledge Roles in Connected Organizations. White Paper – Institute for Knowledge Management. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Kim, A. J. (2000) Community Building on the Web. Peachpit Press, Berkeley, California. Lave, J., and Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. New York: Cambridge University Press. McDermott, R. (1999)/2001). Designing communities of practice: Reflecting on what we’ve learned. In Proceedings of Communities of Practice 2001. Cambridge MA USA: Institute for International Research. Millen, D and Dray, S. (2000) Information sharing in an online community of journalists. Aslib Proceedings 52(5), May 2000, 166-173. Millen, D. R. (2000) Community Portals and Collective Goods: Conversation Archives as an Information Resource. Proceedings of HICSS - 33rd Annual Hawaii International conference on Systems Sciences, Maui, Hawaii: January 4-7. Muller, M.J. (2000). Models of the Social Construction of Knowledge and Authority in Business Organizations. Plenary presentation at Human Computer Interaction Consortium, Winter Park CO USA, February 2000. Muller, M.J., and Carey, K. (2001). Design as a Minority Discipline in a Software Company: Toward Requirements for a Community of Practice. Plenary presentation at Human Computer Interaction Consortium, Winter Park CO USA, February 2001. Nardi, B., & O'Day, V. (1996). Intelligent agents: what we learned in the library. Libri 46 (2), pp. 59-88. Nardi, B., and O’Day, V. (1999). Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Nonnecke, B. and Preece, J. (2000). Lurker Demographics: Counting the Silent. In Proceedings of CHI 2000. Den Haag: ACM.