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Knowledge Sharing and Communities of Practice 173

Box 5.10
A vignette: Knowledge sharing and the search for a SARS cure

Global teams of scientists working on a vaccine for the SARS virus (severe acute respiratory
syndrome) have been collaborating online to store common knowledge on a Web site, to
look up experts, and to create communities. They make use of a KM tool from Knexa
(http://www.knexa.com) to stay in touch and to receive pertinent up-to-date information
without having to actively search for it. This Web site has become a virtual home to the
collection of international scientists working on the SARS problem. Although there has
been much published on how incentives are needed to get people to embark upon KM
solutions, this is not the case here. The major incentive is that this knowledge network
makes it easier for them to successfully do their job. Several groups can work simultane-
ously instead of sequentially to move ahead more quickly.

Putnam (1995) examines social capital in terms of the degree of civic involvement,
as measured by voter turnout, newspaper readership, membership in choral societies
and football clubs, and confi dence in public institutions. Northern Italy, where all
these indicators are higher, shows signifi cantly improved rates of governance, insti-
tutional performance, and development when other orthodox factors were controlled
for. His recent work on the United States ( Putnam 2000 ) uses a similar approach,
combining data from both academic and commercial sources to show a persistent
long-term decline in America ’ s stock of social capital. Putnam validates data from
various sources against the fi ndings of the General Social Survey, widely recognized
as one of the most reliable surveys of American social life. Other examples include
the World Values Survey, which has measured interpersonal trust in 22 countries by
asking questions such as: “ Generally speaking, would you say that most people can
be trusted or that you can ’ t be too careful in dealing with people? ” ( Knack and Keefer
1997 ). The Social Capital Initiative at the World Bank funds social capital projects
which will help defi ne and measure social capital, its evolution, and its impact (e.g.,
Narayan and Cassidy 2001 ). Refer to chapter 10 for additional ways of measuring KM
and CoPs.

Strategic Implications of Knowledge Sharing

Some of the strategically important benefi ts of knowledge sharing include:

• Connect professionals across platforms and across distances
• Standardize professional practices