Communities of Practice: Knowledge Management for the Global Organization



I found this an interesting article about the social aspects of online collaborations through communities of practice. It was interesting that technology has allowed organizations to encourage the formations of online groups. One of the more interesting aspects I found mentioned in the article was the effect that online calibration had in affecting conformity with it appearing that professional communities of practice online were less likely to conform to a single viewpoint than similar communities meeting in real space. The article mentioned that it appeared that the fact that people were communicating through the interface of technology allowed people to resist the need to confirm to the majority viewpoint.


Reference
Resnick, M.L., Mejia, A. (2007). Communities of Practice: Knowledge Management for the Global Organization. Paper presented at the 2007 Industrial Engineering and Research Conference. Retrieved April 16, 2011 from http://proquest.umi.com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/pqdweb?index=11&did=1864150261&SrchMode=1&sid=12&Fmt=2&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1302329578&clientId=22212

Just posting this topic in relation to articles I posted earlier

Subject: How online collaboration has affected the software development industry Reference 4 Shared Waypoints and Social Tagging to Support Collaboration in Software Development By Margaret-Anne Storey, Li-Te Cheng, Ian Bull, Peter Rigby (2006) ABSTRACT This paper presents the conceptual design of TagSEA, a collaborative tool to support asynchronous software development. Our goal is to develop a lightweight source code annotation tool that enhances navigation, coordination, and capture of knowledge relevant to a software development team. Our design is inspired by combining "waypoints" from geographical navigation with "social tagging" from social bookmarking software to support coordination and communication among software developers. We describe the motivation behind this work, walk through the design and implementation, and report early feedback on how this lightweight tool supports collaborative software engineering activities. Finally, we suggest a number of new research directions that this topic exposes. (Rigby, 2006) Full document available from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.136.3988&rep=rep1&type=pdf TagSEA software/code available from http://tagsea.sourceforge.net/download.html Bibliography Rigby, P. S., Margaret-Anne; Cheng, Li-Te; Bull,Ian. (2006). Shared waypoints and social tagging to support collaboration in software development. Paper presented at the CSCW'06, ACM http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.136.3988&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Review of article - Shared Waypoints and Social Tagging to Support Collaboration in Software Development This article reviews the development and purpose of TagSEA and gives us an understanding of the technology and why it is useful for software development collaboration. This is software that is designed to allow developers to place collaborative annotations attached to specific locations in source code. This is a professionally written article that looks at both why the software was developed and how it works, including a trial evaluation of the software. It also includes information on what it is written in (java) and what it works as part of (eclipse IDE). The article reviews what it can be used for and includes images displaying the look and feel of the software but does not explain how to use the software itself or provide a link to further information. However research on the internet has provided a link http://tagsea.sourceforge.net to where the software is available. The site where the software is located provides further information on how to use the software and links for downloading it as well as information about further developments. Both the article "Shared Waypoints and Social Tagging to Support Collaboration in Software Development" and the website appear to be written/designed to be read/used by people with technical skills i.e. developers and tends to use a significant amount of specialised terminology. Rigby, P. S., Margaret-Anne; Cheng, Li-Te; Bull,Ian. (2006). Shared waypoints and social tagging to support collaboration in software development. Paper presented at the CSCW'06, ACM Retrieved from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.136.3988&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Subject: How online collaboration has affected the software development industry Reference 3 Continuous Coordination: A New Paradigm to Support Globally Distributed Software Development Projects by David Redmiles , André Van Der Hoek , Ban Al-ani , Tobias Hildenbr , Stephen Quirk , Anita Sarma , Roberto Silveira , Silva Filho , Cleidson De Souza , Erik Trainer ABSTRACT Along with the rapid globalization of companies, the globalization of software development has become a reality. Many software projects are now distributed in diverse sites across the globe. The distance between these sites creates several problems that did not exist for previously collocated teams. Problems with the coordination of the activities, as well as with the communication between team members, emerge. Many collaborative software engineering tools that have been used to date, in global software development projects, exhibit a fundamental paradox: they are meant to support the collaborative activity of software development, but cause individuals and groups to work more or less independently from one another. The underlying issue is that existing software engineering tools, such as configuration management repositories, issue trackers, and workflow engines, separate time and tasks in concrete but isolated process steps. Designing tools based on the premise that human activities can be codified and that periodic resynchronization of tasks is an easy step reflects poor understanding human nature. We therefore propose a new approach to supporting collaborative work called Continuous Coordination. Underlying Continuous Coordination is the premise that humans must not and cannot have their method of collaboration rigidly dictated, but should be supported flexibly with both the tools and the information to coordinate their activities and to collaborate in their activities as they see fit. In this paper, we define the concept of Continuous Coordination, introduce our work

Review of article - Continuous Coordination: A New Paradigm to Support Globally Distributed Software Development Projects This is quite a useful paper about current issues relating to the collaboration of software development and though it does not appear to have been published it is still a well-researched review of the topic. It focuses on the developing technology and changing methods of collaboration when developing software. It reviews a number of issues such as coordination issues that may arise between different sites that are working on a collaborative project together and looks at why these issues arise when developers and designers are working with current versions of collaborative software. It further focuses on why these issues arise and then reviews some of the software that is currently under development that may fix these issues. The software that it reviews includes YANCEES notification service that is an automatic publication/subscribe service for keeping software collaboration coordinated; Palantir workspace awareness tool that is an enterprise-level integrated analysis platform that works on a client/server model; Ariadne that is a tool for the collaborative searching/analysis of databases/source code and the graphical visualization and tracking of such searches; the TriVis which is a utility for graphically tracing collaborative software development and interactions and finally WorldView which is similar to TriVis but can extend from visualising design models to high level representations of development team interactions. Overall this is a very interesting article about the future direction of software development collaboration Redmiles, D. V. D. H., André; Al-ani, Ban; Hildenbr,Tobias; Quirk, Stephen; Sarma, Anita; Silveira, Roberto; Filho, Silva; De Souza, Cleidson; Trainer, Erik Continuous Coordination: A New Paradigm to Support Globally Distributed Software Development Projects. Retrieved from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/dow

Subject: How online collaboration has affected the software development industry Reference 2 Opening minds: Cultural change with the introduction of open-source collaboration methods ABSTRACT As open-source software becomes accepted worldwide, open-source collaboration and development methods are also gaining greater momentum. Collaboration based on the open-source paradigm is increasingly being used to improve multisite development and teamwork inside companies. Drawing on experience in projects for improving multisite collaboration, this paper explains how we evaluate communication and collaboration problems, assess obstacles to change, and facilitate the change by introducing employees to the benefits of the collaborative model over traditional development projects in a workshop setting. This method has proven to be a valuable ''mind-opener'' and helps identify specific obstacles that need to be addressed as part of the introduction of open-source development and collaboration methods. The paper concludes with lessons learned for facilitating the introduction of these methods in an organization. (Neus, 2005) Full document available from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5386734 Bibliography Neus, A. (2005). Opening minds: cultural change with the introduction of open-source collaboration methods. IBM systems journal, 44(2), 215. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5386734

Review of article - Opening minds: cultural change with the introduction of open-source collaboration methods This article reviews a different part of collaboration in the software development environment than the other articles. It looks at how software development collaboration works in the open source environment or at least that part of open source environment where developers do not all use the same development tools to develop a project. It is a detailed and well researched article that has been peer reviewed and that looks at the theories behind open source development and why it is different from traditional collaborative software development. One of the main differences between this article and my others it than it focuses more on the cultural and social aspects of collaboration in developing software and tends to see collaboration as much looser and less controlled than in traditional software development. The article does not focus on particular tools for collaboration when writing application code but sees the collaboration as more of many individuals working independently and mainly collaborating on documenting what is going on using software such as a a wiki as a content management system. This is much less controlled than traditional collaborative software development and quality control in this case is done by maintaining a detailed version history using the wiki. Neus, A. (2005). Opening minds: cultural change with the introduction of open-source collaboration methods. IBM systems journal, 44(2), 215. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5386734

Subject: How online collaboration has affected the software development industry Reference 1: Online Collaboration and Agile Software Development By Doug Poirier, January 11, 2007 ABSTRACT Agile software development requires input from all team members, and such collaboration is most effective when everyone participates. (Poirier, 2007) Full document available from http://drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/196900197 ThinkTank software is available from http://www.groupsystems.com/ Bibliography Poirier, D. (2007). Online Collaboration and Agile Software Development. Dr.Dobbs Retrieved from http://drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/196900197

Review of article - Online Collaboration and Agile Software Development This article is in an online magazine http://drdobbs.com and is aimed at software developers. The article is not peer reviewed but is by a software developer writing for other software developers in a well-respected magazine. It does not initially focus on using collaborative software development tools but looks at the issues and problems that affect remote groups attempting to collaborate on developing software without the assistance of collaborative software. It is written in an easy going manner and the author talks about issues that he has personally experienced. It then starts to focus on the issue of collaborative software and on the online collaboration tool called ThinkTank that is available from GroupSystems (http://www.groupsystems.com) and reviews details the use of the software in a trial setup. At this point a number of features of the software are outlined and screen dumps showing some of the features of the software are also included. A review of the article and a latter review of the GroupSystems website did make it clear that the ThinkTank software is more of a collaborative meeting software rather than software that developers use to collaborate when doing actual programing, but it is still a useful piece of software for developers to use when communicating between multiple sites. Poirier, D. (2007). Online Collaboration and Agile Software Development. Dr.Dobbs Retrieved April 8, 2011, from http://drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/196900197