Page 184 -

Knowledge Sharing and Communities of Practice 167

nications such as face-to-face meetings or instant messaging conversations will have
the fastest feedback (people can react right away to what has been said or typed),
participants can use natural language, and the degree of social presence is at a very
high level. Social presence and media richness do tend to go hand-in-hand, but there
are some channels that possess low media richness with a high degree of social pres-
ence, such as newsgroups, bulletin boards, personal Web pages, and blogs ( Dalkir
2007 ). Finally, when the knowledge to be shared is more tacit than explicit in nature,
it becomes more imperative to make use of channels that are quite high in both social
presence and media richness ( Vickery et al. 2004 ).
We can also look more closely at the types of exchanges that occur in knowledge
sharing. The majority of the knowledge exchanges consist of requests, revisions, modi-
fi cations, or some form of repackaging, publications, references (e.g., tell people about,
who knows about), recommendations, reuse, and reorganization (e.g., adding on of
categories, metadata). Reuse is also an excellent measure of the success of knowledge
sharing and it can be thought of as being analogous to a citation index. Scholars and
researchers produce a number of scientifi c publications but a metric that is perhaps
even more meaningful than the number of papers published is the citation index,
which keeps track of how many others have made use of this work. When others do
refer to their work, this is evidenced by specifi c citations and references to the original
work or a reuse of the original content. It is possible to track such reuse in a knowledge
management system as well and in some organizations, this is used to evaluate how
good a knowledge sharer a given employee is.
Knowledge-sharing communities are not just about providing access to data and
documents: they are about interconnecting the social network of people who pro-
duced the knowledge. A good knowledge management system should include infor-
mation not just on the people who produced the knowledge but those who will make
use of it. There is as much value in talking to people experienced in using knowledge
as there is in talking to the original authors (subject matter experts). One way this can
be achieved is by making the knowledge visible. This typically involves making the
interactions online visible in some way so that “ I know that you know x , y , and z ”
and “ I know that you know that I know a , b , and c . ” This helps create a mutual aware-
ness, mutual accountability, and mutual engagement to knit group members more
closely together.
Figure 5.8 shows a high-level representation of how a CoP can be rendered more
visible using social computing systems such as the Babble system ( Erickson and Kellogg
2000 ). Babble was designed as an online multiuser environment to support the cre-
ation, explanation, and sharing of knowledge through text-based conversations.