Maria Teresa A. Gouvêa

Towards Reputation Systems applied to Communities of Practice

Communities of practice (CoPs) encourage the exchange of experiences within organizations, but there is a risk involved in regard to the quality of participation. For this reason, it is important to provide a means for the community to be able to recognize the reliability and usefulness of the participation of individuals involved. This paper presents a proposal for the use of reputation systems in CoPs in order to assist users in creating relationships for honest and useful participation, based on trust, for the benefit of the entire community.

Scoring Mechanisms to Encourage Participation in Communities of Practice

The process of creation of organization knowledge is a social process within which knowledge is shared among the members comprising an organization. Communities of practice have stood out as a way of promoting organizational learning, facilitating information and the knowledge exchange process among the members of an organization. Therefore, it is up to the companies to encourage their building and upkeep. This work presents the scoring strategy to encourage the participation of its members. A case study is presented, describing the application of the scoring mechanism to a community of practice, using work/learning cooperative/collaborative environment named TeamWorks

Designing support to participation in communities of practice through recommender systems

Communities of practice have been adopted by many organizations to promote collaborative learning and sharing of knowledge. Although various applications have been built to support this learning process, they fail to deal with one of the main problem: keeping users interacting and exchanging relevant information. We claim that the supporting system should provide the necessary stimulus for the community members to collaborate. Therefore, we claim the recommendations as a type of loyalty mechanism. The design of the collaborative environment TeamWorks is presented, illustrating our proposal.

TeamWorks: supporting and stimulating participation in communities of practice

The communities of practice have been one of the ways adopted by organizations to promote the sharing of knowledge, the cooperative learning and consequently the improvement of working processes. However, one of its greatest problems is how to keep users interacting and exchanging relevant information to the whole community. Loyalty mechanisms used in marketing are proposed as a solution for this problem, aiming to stimulate the active participation of the members. A cooperative work environment, named TeamWorks is presented, illustrating the loyalty mechanism concerning documents recommendation.

A Proposal for Recognizing Reputation within Communities of Practice

One of the most critical points for Communities of Practice is shared information credibility. Professionals only feel secure to reuse solutions presented and discussed within the scope of the community if a process of trusting is well established among its members at that moment. We propose the use of Reputation Systems to promote trust among participants and, consequently, stimulate participation through the recording of relevant information, such as ideas, opinions, solutions, and recommendations.