This paper provides an excellent overview of the concept of a Community of Practice (CoP), a social network of professionals independent of any one company. According to the author, CoPs are useful in decreasing the learning curve of new employees, supporting faster responses to customer inquiries, and enhancing the generation of new ideas.
Like Kelly and Matthew, I found the author's concerns about conformity within CoPs to be of most interest. 'Information influence' and 'social cascades' occur when a highly-perceived individual's theory is widely supported because of the high perception of that individual, causing the contrary views of other individuals to go unheard.
Open source software development communities, which have been likened to CoPs (Ye & Kishida, 2003), exhibit this problem because of the division between 'core members' and other contributors. For example, a feature request on the KeePass SourceForge site, which was asked by a member of 7 years, received the reply of "Nice idea, thanks! I've now added an 'Export' button in the icon picker dialog" from a core developer (Tracker: Feature Requests, 2011). In contrast, a member of 6 days wanted to know why the source code repository for the project was not open to public view (a valid question, considering it's an open source project), but the reply from the afore-mentioned core developer simply stated that the code repository was "On my PC" (Source code..., 2011). This example demonstrates the vast difference between how the opinions and ideas of highly-perceived members and newer members are treated in Communities of Practice.
The author proposes that maintaining anonymity or providing incentives to debate during initial deliberation phases can help to overcome such problems. I think that mechanisms such as these might contribute to the promotion of a culture of openness, which would in turn address the wider social problem of inequality within CoPs.
Like Kelly and Matthew, I found the author's concerns about conformity within CoPs to be of most interest. 'Information influence' and 'social cascades' occur when a highly-perceived individual's theory is widely supported because of the high perception of that individual, causing the contrary views of other individuals to go unheard.
Open source software development communities, which have been likened to CoPs (Ye & Kishida, 2003), exhibit this problem because of the division between 'core members' and other contributors. For example, a feature request on the KeePass SourceForge site, which was asked by a member of 7 years, received the reply of "Nice idea, thanks! I've now added an 'Export' button in the icon picker dialog" from a core developer (Tracker: Feature Requests, 2011). In contrast, a member of 6 days wanted to know why the source code repository for the project was not open to public view (a valid question, considering it's an open source project), but the reply from the afore-mentioned core developer simply stated that the code repository was "On my PC" (Source code..., 2011). This example demonstrates the vast difference between how the opinions and ideas of highly-perceived members and newer members are treated in Communities of Practice.
The author proposes that maintaining anonymity or providing incentives to debate during initial deliberation phases can help to overcome such problems. I think that mechanisms such as these might contribute to the promotion of a culture of openness, which would in turn address the wider social problem of inequality within CoPs.
References:
Ye, Y. & Kishida, K. (2003). Toward an Understanding of the Motivation of Open Source Software Developers. Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Software Engineering. Accessed April 15, 2011, from http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=776867
Tracker: Feature Requests. (2011). Accessed April 17, 2011, from http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detaila&aid=3256113&group_id=95013&atid=609911
Source code repository for KeePass?. (2011). Accessed April 17, 2011, from http://sourceforge.net/projects/keepass/forums/forum/329220/topic/4478457