Designing technology for virtual communities of practice

Wenger's CoP structure from http://www.ssdd.bcu.ac.uk/esdu/cops/default.htm

 With the importance of communities of practice in organization being established, organizations now should turn their attention to ensuring that their IT infrastructure enable COPs. A simple folder on a corporate server is not sufficient.  Allocating a space on  corporate intranet for synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, discussion, and content management (Lewis, 2002) may help as long as the host organization has moved from the static intranet to social intranet.  Virtual communities of practice can not be sustainable and flourish in organizations with dispersed population of employees if communication tools do not match main processes that are happening in a CoP. As organizations decide how to support COPs, they should know more about COP. What elements or components should be present in order for this type of community function? What does differentiate a community of practice from a network of practice? The most accepted framework for a CoP is the one that has been developed by Lave and Wenger (1991) and Brown and Duguid (1991). You may read more about this framework at the  Wenger's blog.

        However, there are different interpretations of the CoP and researchers can't agree on the components and characteristics of the community. It make it challenging for people who develop a portal for VCoP. It is also difficult to objectively evaluate the effectiveness of these groups as there is no consensus on what is, or is not, a true CoP group.    

        There is also no clear or full understanding of how to design social intranet (Pentland, 2012) to accomplish goals important for any organizations such as organizational learning, knowledge management and professional development. At its core, the design problem involves understanding about psychological factors, group dynamics and behavior, knowledge management and the influence of organizational structure and culture on communities of practice. To design a model for the VCoP portal, I study literature about processes that are happening in online communities such as learning, sharing information, and relationship building.
References:

 Lewis, B. (2002) On-Demand KM: A Two-Tier Architecture.  IT Professional, Jan.-Feb., 27-33

 Pentland, A. (2012). Social Efficiency: Rules for Designing Social Networks and Social Media .  Signal Processing Magazine, IEEE, 29(2), 146-147. doi: 10.1109/msp.2011.943659