Using Social Computing to Rejuvenate Communities of Practice

This paper addresses the elements of an implementation of social computing to build knowledge sharing communities of practice within a public sector organization of 1,000+ employees in Singapore. This mplementation is based on the fact that most communities are not successful. With the emergence of the social web, we identify the algorithmic growth of information, the low rate of engagement and the partiality of the classical model of information retrieval as sources for lack of success. Social computing is used as a socio-technical platform to re-interpret the social web for and into an organizational environment. This helps define a coherent ‘stack’ that sustains knowledge sharing communities of practice. The strategy implemented for acceptance and incremental adoption is also presented. Our concluding remarks highlight the ratchet effect that is proper to ‘enterprise social computing’.

Keywords:

Community of Practice , Enterprise 2.0 , Enterprise Social Computing , KnowledgeManagement , Knowledge Sharing , Social Web