Knowledge community

A knowledge community is community construct, stemming from the convergence of knowledge management as a field of study and social exchange theory. Formerly known as a discourse community and having evolved from forums and web forums, knowledge communities are now often referred to as a community of practice or virtual community of practice. As with any field of study, there are various points of view on the motivations, organizing principles and subsequent structure of knowledge communities.

As a web or virtual construct, knowledge communities can be said to have evolved from bulletin board systems, web forums and online discourse communities through the 80s and 90s. When framed with the scores of social networking sites coming online at the turn of the millennia, knowledge communities can be described as another form of social media. The biggest difference between social network sites and knowledge communities is, social network sites typically lack moderation or an outcome orientation. Social knowledge management technologies such as Knowledge Plaza are emerging and aim at reconciling these differences.

Stemming from social exchange theory, a well-established perspective is to view knowledge communities as a type of exchange. The motivations for participating in the exchange vary. The exchange remains open based on the perceived value (e.g., return on time investment) to knowledge community members.

Knowledge communities can also be viewed as a method by which to do organizational or process innovation. KCs are often founded to introduce change to a system, an organizational or societal by identifying, creating, representing and/or distributing data, information and/or knowledge in and via a community context on the pretext that more significant value will be created via a knowledge value chain.

From an organizational perspective, knowledge communities serve to maintain the strong ties and weak ties of the organization with many diverse publics; they help feed quality back into the organization (via more timely feedback and narrative analysis of discussions), drive organization credibility (via more rich exposure and building public trust by incorporating diverse opinion) and speed knowledge transfer and knowledge utilization, as well as do knowledge mobilization (e.g., by providing a conversation space to bridge gaps between research and practice).

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