Use of scenario evaluation in preparation for deployment of a collaborative system for knowledge transfer - the case of KiMERA

This paper presented an approach for the evaluation of a collaborative system, after the completion of system development and software testing but before its deployment. Scenario and collaborative episodes were designed and data collected from users role-playing. This was found to be a useful step in refining the user training, in setting the right level of user expectation when the system started to roll-out to real users and in providing feedback to the development team

Community mirrors for supporting corporate innovation and motivation

In this paper we are exploring the idea of applying community support concepts and ubiquitous user interfaces to supporting the motivation to innovate in corporate settings. Our special focus is on the early phase of the innovation process – the phase of idea generation and suggestion management. The key idea is to provide awareness for a company’s creative potential and appreciation for the idea creators in a corporate setting by displaying information from community platforms handling the suggestion management process on public shared displays (“Idea Mirrors”) in the office space

Idea Mirrors – Unterstützung von Innovation in Unternehmen durch Community-Awareness

In diesem Beitrag diskutieren wir die Idee, Konzepte aus den Bereichen der Community-Unterstützung und ubiquitären Benutzungsschnittstellen auf die Unterstützung von Innovation in Unternehmen anzuwenden. Unser Fokus liegt dabei auf der frühen Phase des Innovationsprozesses – der Ideengenerierung und des Vorschlagsmanagements. Kernidee unseres Ansatzes ist es dabei, Awareness über das kreative Potential des Unternehmens bereitzustellen und eingebrachte Ideen durch öffentliche Präsentation zu würdigen, indem sie auf großen Wandbildschirmen („Idea Mirrors“) im Bürobereich dargestellt werden

A virtual-community-centric model for coordination in the South African public sector

Organizations face challenges constantly owing to limited resources. As such, to take advantage of new opportunities and to mitigate possible risks they look for new ways to collaborate, by sharing knowledge and competencies. Coordination among partners is critical in order to achieve success. The segmented South African public sector is no different. Driven by the desire to ensure proper service delivery in this sector, various government bodies and service providers play different roles towards the attainment of common goals. This is easier said than done, given the complexity of the distributed nature of the environment. Heterogeneity, autonomy, and the increasing need to collaborate provoke the need to develop an integrative and dynamic coordination support service system in the SA public sector. Thus, the research looks to theories/concepts and existing coordination practices to ground the process of development. To inform the design of the proposed artefact the research employs an interdisciplinary approach championed by coordination theory to review coordination-related theories and concepts. The effort accounts for coordination constructs that characterize and transform the problem and solution spaces. Thus, requirements are explicit towards identifying coordination breakdowns and their resolution. Furthermore, how coordination in a distributed environment is supported in practice is considered from a socio-technical perspective in an effort to account holistically for coordination support. Examining existing solutions identified shortcomings that, if addressed, can help to improve the solutions for coordination, which are often rigidly and narrowly defined. The research argues that introducing a mediating technological artefact conceived from a virtual community and service lenses can serve as a solution to the problem. By adopting a design-science research paradigm, the research develops a model as a primary artefact to support coordination from a collaboration standpoint. The suggestions from theory and practice and the unique case requirement identified through a novel case analysis framework form the basis of the model design. The proposed model support operation calls for an architecture which employs a design pattern that divides a complex whole into smaller, simpler parts, with the aim of reducing the system complexity. Four fundamental functions of the supporting architecture are introduced and discussed as they would support the operation and activities of the proposed collaboration lifecycle model geared towards streamlining coordination in a distributed environment. As part of the model development knowledge contributions are made in several ways. Firstly, an analytical instrument is presented that can be used by an enterprise architect or business analyst to study the coordination status quo of a collaborative activity in a distributed environment. Secondly, a lifecycle model is presented as meta-process model with activities that are geared towards streamlining the coordination of dynamic collaborative activities or projects. Thirdly, an architecture that will enable the technical virtual community-centric, context-aware environment that hosts the process-based operations is offered. Finally, the validation tool that represents the applied contribution to the research that promises possible adaptation for similar circumstances is presented. The artefacts contribute towards a design theory in IS research for the development and improvement of coordination support services in a distributed environment such as the South African public sector

GeNeMe ´04 - Virtuelle Organisation und Neue Medien 2004: Workshop GeNeMe2004 - Gemeinschaften in Neuen Medien: TU Dresden, 7. und 8. Oktober 2004

Aus dem Vorwort: "Bereits zum siebten Mal findet der Workshop „GeNeMe - Gemeinschaften in Neuen Medien“ mit einer Vielzahl interessanter Beiträge in folgenden Rubriken statt: • Praxis, Visionen, Trends und Chancen von GeNeMe (eingeladene Vorträge), • Konzepte, Geschäfts- und Betreibermodelle von GeNeMe, • E-Learning in GeNeMe, • Anwendungen und Praxisbeispiele von GeNeMe und • Soziologische, psychologische, personalwirtschaftliche, didaktische und rechtliche Aspekte von GeNeMe. Aufgrund der Bedeutung des Themas, der Resonanz auf den Call-for-Proposal und der Beschränkungen, die bez. des zeitlichen Rahmens des Workshops bestanden, konnten trotz hoher Qualität leider nur etwa die Hälfte der eingereichten Beiträge Berücksichtigung finden. Das Interesse am Thema GeNeMe ist sowohl in der Forschung wie auch in der Praxis weiterhin sehr groß. Dies zeigt die Breite der zur Diskussion gestellten Themen und eingereichten Beiträge.

Collaborative Knowledge Visualisation for Cross-Community Knowledge Exchange

The notion of communities as informal social networks based on shared interests or common practices has been increasingly used as an important unit of analysis when considering the processes of cooperative creation and sharing of knowledge. While knowledge exchange within communities has been extensively researched, different studies observed the importance of cross-community knowledge exchange for the creation of new knowledge and innovation in knowledge-intensive organizations. Especially in knowledge management a critical problem has become the need to support the cooperation and exchange of knowledge between different communities with highly specialized expertise and activities. Though several studies discuss the importance and difficulties of knowledge sharing across community boundaries, the development of technological support incorporating these findings has been little addressed. This work presents an approach to supporting cross-community knowledge exchange based on using knowledge visualisation for facilitating information access in unfamiliar community domains. The theoretical grounding and practical relevance of the proposed approach are ensured by defining a requirements model that integrates theoretical frameworks for cross-community knowledge exchange with practical needs of typical knowledge management processes and sensemaking tasks in information access in unfamiliar domains. This synthesis suggests that visualising knowledge structures of communities and supporting the discovery of relationships between them during access to community spaces, could provide valuable support for cross-community discovery and sharing of knowledge. This is the main hypothesis investigated in this thesis. Accordingly, a novel method is developed for eliciting and visualising implicit knowledge structures of individuals and communities in form of dynamic knowledge maps that make the elicited knowledge usable for semantic exploration and navigation of community spaces. The method allows unobtrusive construction of personal and community knowledge maps based on user interaction with information and their use for dynamic classification of information from a specific point of view. The visualisation model combines Document Maps presenting main topics, document clusters and relationships between knowledge reflected in community spaces with Concept Maps visualising personal and shared conceptual structures of community members. The technical realization integrates Kohonen’s self-organizing maps with extraction of word categories from texts, collaborative indexing and personalised classification based on user-induced templates. This is accompanied by intuitive visualisation and interaction with complex information spaces based on multi-view navigation of document landscapes and concept networks. The developed method is prototypically implemented in form of an application framework, a concrete system and a visual information interface for multi-perspective access to community information spaces, the Knowledge Explorer. The application framework implements services for generating and using personal and community knowledge maps to support explicit and implicit knowledge exchange between members of different communities. The Knowledge Explorer allows simultaneous visualisation of different personal and community knowledge structures and enables their use for structuring, exploring and navigating community information spaces from different points of view. The empirical evaluation in a comparative laboratory study confirms the adequacy of the developed solutions with respect to specific requirements of the cross-community problem and demonstrates much better quality of knowledge access compared to a standard information seeking reference system. The developed evaluation framework and operative measures for quality of knowledge access in cross-community contexts also provide a theoretically grounded and practically feasible method for further developing and evaluating new solutions addressing this important but little investigated problem

Comunidades de marca e meios sociais: o caso da rádio no Facebook

Tese de Doutoramento em Ciências Sociais na especialidade de Ciências da ComunicaçãoA rádio está a atravessar profundas alterações na forma como é produzida e consumida. Estas mudanças são consequências da convergência e da desregulamentação que, em conjunto, proporcionam um aumento da pressão concorrencial entre rádios. Neste contexto, o marketing passou a orientar as estratégias de programação das rádios (Cordeiro, 2007). Simultaneamente, a Web 2.0 proporcionou um crescimento gigantesco do uso dos meios sociais, em particular do Facebook, que tem levado as marcas em geral, e as rádios em particular, a aglomerar o maior número de fãs possível, com o objetivo de criar comunidades de marca. A partir das características e dos tipos de práticas sociais nas comunidades de marca (Muniz & O’Guinn, 2001; Schau et al., 2009), investigaram-se páginas de Facebook de estações de rádio, recorrendo à análise de conteúdo. Os dados levaram a concluir que, no caso das rádios, o Facebook é um canal de comunicação entre o meio e uma audiência, que se comporta como tal, sem traços de comunidade de marca. Para contraste, inclui-se um estudo sobre a plataforma de meios sociais 9gag onde se identificam caraterísticas e práticas de comunidade de marca.Radio is going through profound changes in the way it is produced and consumed. These changes are consequences of convergence and deregulation which, together, provide an increase in competitive pressure between radios. In this context, marketing and brand passed to orient the radio programming strategies (Cordeiro, 2007). At the same time, Web 2.0 has provided a huge growth in the use of social media, particularly Facebook, which has led brands in general, and radio in particular, to agglomerate the largest possible number of fans on social media, with the goal of creating brand communities. From the characteristics and types of social practices in brand communities (Muniz & O'Guinn., 2001; Schau et al, 2009), we investigated radio stations Facebook pages, using content analysis. The data led to the conclusion that, in the case of radio, Facebook is a communication channel between the medium and an audience, which behaves as such, with no traces of brand community. A study on social media platform 9gag content was done to illustrate how a brand community behaves.N/