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Online communities…communities of practice…knowledge management…human capital. For some time now, companies have believed that they can be more effective—and more profitable—if they could only get their people to talk to each other and share what they know. Globalization, acquisitions, and diversification have led to workforces that are more spread out and more varied. In addition to creating the need for a flexible, agile workforce, the evolving and sometime volatile business climate has reduced the ability of companies to rely on stable groups of people who slowly grow their expertise over many years.
To address this need, companies have built or bought knowledge management portals, tools for growing communities of practice, and other expensive, often complex software systems. As with other software systems, however, utilization is not guaranteed, and the return on investment may never materialize. What functionality should such systems provide to increase the probability of payback? How can product specifications be evaluated? By what benchmarks can existing implementations be inspected?
This article offers a set of heuristics drawn from published academic research into online communities of practice. These heuristics may be used to inform design, or they can be used as heuristics in an evaluation process. These heuristics are preliminary—we have successfully applied them informally to evaluate an existing system at a large corporation. During this evaluation, the issues uncovered matched well with the issues raised by users of the system. The heuristics also uncovered additional issues previously unrecognized. At the same time, we recognize that more testing needs to be conducted.
The Heuristics
Software systems supporting online communities of practice should consider providing the following functionality:
An important aspect of communities is the ability to communally generate and evaluate new ideas about the processes within the practice as well as the function of the community. Tools that can provide this ability range from simple asynchronous discussion and synchronous chat to sophisticated packages designed specifically for idea generation, ranking, and selection of those ideas. Some key questions to consider for this dimension are:
Participants will more actively engage in electronic collaboration if the interactions are structured in time, space, and scope. Community in general is most effective when activity is driven by context of its rituals and its purpose. Tools, events, and content should be structured to provide this context for action. Specifically, some key questions concerning structure are:
A community thrives on the ability of its members to believe in and articulate its purpose and goals. If a community centers around a particular practice (such as a profession or use of a software package), it is important that members are able to use a common language in expressing what they are about and what they are trying to accomplish both to each other and to those outside the community. It is also important that they are able to address common problems that they are facing together and collaboratively. The following questions address this unifying purpose and focus:
Communities constantly evolve. Both the information and the people that participate in them are constantly in a state of flux. The space needs the ability to add, change, or delete information or functionality in response to community changes. Some key questions that should be asked are:
Identity is critical to a community. Communities and the individuals in them must have vehicles for expressing how they are unique, what role they play in a larger scheme, and what maintains the bonds of the members. Identity is established through the roles of the members, the rituals of the group, and the history that they create together. Many of the questions addressed in the other dimension also apply to the establishing of identity:
A community should allow for an adequate level of control and moderation. The ability to provide feedback about members' participation in dialog and other activities enables the environment to serve as a tool for instilling and maintaining the social norms of the group. The following questions should be considered:
Tools in the environment should not only be structured around a particular purpose but also be rich and varied. A variety of different types of dialog take place in a community: negotiation, problem-solving, sharing, debate, and socializing, for example. Every effort should be made to limit members' feelings that the tools in the environment limit their communication styles. Specifically, the following questions should be asked:
Communities evolve and grow over time, and the tools they use must not only accommodate this change but foster it as well. Learning is the key mechanism by which the community grows and evolves. Many of the questions listed above help promote a learning environment. Specifically, the following questions are important to consider:
Communities generally have both online and offline activities. Often, communities will hold get-togethers, members will network in person, or collaborate on problems outside the context of the electronic space. The following questions should be considered in light of this other aspect of community:
We hope that by offering these heuristics in preliminary form, we may generate discussion and other attempts to use, validate, or improve these principles. We also, in the near future, plan to publish an expanded version of the heuristics with references to all the sources from which they have been derived.
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