Collaborative knowledge building: The case of iakm as a scientific community of practice (cop)

Abstract

This study addresses the special context of Communities of Practice (CoPs) in the case of scientists and academics, which is still a little studied environment. The paper considers the case of Scientific Associations and, particularly, the International Association for Knowledge Management (IAKM). As will be examined in the paper, IAKM (www.iakm.net) can be considered as a sort of CoP for the international community of KM researchers. It was established in 2012 with a mission to address existing challenges in knowledge management (KM) research, and to contribute to a unified view of KM. This study analyzes the structure and collaborative processes of IAKM members to better understand the community's knowledge development behaviour and performance. It combines a qualitative representation of the "history" of IAKM and its salient characteristics and milestones as a CoP and a quantitative analysis of data on collaborative activities, collected from all IAKM members via email. Members were asked to fill in a spreadsheet form with the following data for each of their collaborative activities carried out in the period 2011-2020: (a) collaborating members, (b) type of collaboration, (c) year when carried out and (d) short description of collaborative activity. The initial analysis was performed by simple frequency count. A follow-up social network analysis (SNA) was used to provide deeper insight into the community dynamics. The initial analysis revealed some interesting points, in particular concerning the kind of collaboration, the distribution of interactions across the community, and the dynamic patterns of these interactions over time. Overall, these findings contributed to our enhanced understanding of the nature of a scientific association as a CoP, and how it informed KM-related scholarship over the past decade. Specifically, the study found that IAKM exhibited a cohesive and active core membership that contributed significantly to the development of the field. The study also pointed to areas for further improvement that could serve as a basis for future planning of scientific associations as CoPs.