A knowledge management system and social networking service to connect communities of practice

Abstract

Communities of practice (CoPs) emerge within companies by the way of informal discussions with practitioners who share ideas and help each other to solve problems. Each CoP develops its own practices, reinventing what is certainly being replicated somewhere else, in other companies. Our work aims at connecting CoPs centred on the same general activity and capitalising on all the produced knowledge. For that purpose, we propose a model of the interconnection of communities of practice (ICP), based on the concept of constellation of communities of practice (CCP) developed by Wenger. The model of ICP was implemented and has been used to develop the TE-Cap 2 platform. This platform relies on a specific knowledge management tool and a social networking service. We applied the model and platform to the case of university tutors. The TE-Cap 2 platform has been used in real conditions with tutors from different institutions and countries and we present the main results of this descriptive investigation. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.