copyright 978-1-4673-2070-2/12/$31.00 ©2012 IEEE 1 Using “Simple” Technology to Support Geographically Distributed Communities of Practice Martin R. Gibbs, Greg Wadley, Stephanie Ng Department of Computing and Information Systems The University of Melbourne Parkville, Australia Abstract—Communities of practice are important social structures for creating and sharing knowledge and it has been suggested that organizations should develop and support communities of practice for effective knowledge management. As a result, there is growing interest in the use of information and communication technology (ICT) to enable and support geographically dispersed communities of practice. In this paper, we report on a vibrant and productive, geographically dispersed community of practice that has spontaneously emerged over the last decade. The members of this community are computer support technicians, working within a large Australian university. Our results indicate that ICT can support a community of practice and this involves knowledge sharing as well as socialization. We describe the community, the interactions between members, the way the community is organized and managed, and the way it is enabled by ICT. Keywords-Community of practice, e-mail, listserv, information technology support, distributed work, computer supported cooperate work (CSCW) I. INTRODUCTION Communities of practice are important social structures through which people create, refine, share and learn knowledge [1, 2, 3]. They are self-organizing groups that coalesce around a common interest or endeavor. Through mutual engagement and interaction in the pursuit of these endeavors, these groups develop a repertoire of shared work practices and knowledge, and a sense of joint enterprise. A number of authors have suggested that supporting communities of practice should be central to organizational knowledge management initiatives because of the crucial role these communities play in the creation and circulation of knowledge [4, 5, 6]. This paper reports on a case study of a geographically distributed occupational community [7, 8]: the computer- support personnel working at a major Australian university. In this paper we refer to these people as Local Information Technology Experts (LITEs). LITEs are employed by departments and faculties in a variety of roles such as network and systems administration and end-user support. Typically, LITEs are physically isolated from each other and rarely get the opportunity to meet face-to-face. A listserv-style e-mailing list – the Forum for LITEs (FLITE) – has emerged over the past decade as a successful medium for supporting the work of the LITE community [7]. In this paper we adopt communities of practice as our units of analysis to understand how ICT can be used to sustain a social milieu conducive to knowledge sharing amongst geographically distributed individuals engaged in common forms of technical work. We center our analysis on the FLITE community, and have come to understand this community to consist of a core of regular and active members who are strongly and mutually engaged with one another. Surrounding this core of activity and engaged participants is a halo, or network, of peripheral participants who subscribe to FLITE but do not post to the list regularly, if at all. We grouped FLITE messages into five broad categories: Q&A (question and answer), announcements/FYI, discussions, humor, and postings about FLITE itself. FLITE traffic resulted in knowledge sharing and community building. A number of properties of FLITE were important to its ability to support the complex social interactions entailed in a viable community of practice. We discuss these properties of FLITE below. II. COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE Work is a necessarily collaborative affair. It occurs within what can be called “communities of practice” [1, 2, 3]. A community of practice is a basic social unit in which work gets done, and in which the skills and knowledge pertinent to that work are learnt, shared and developed, and evolve over time [2]. Communities of practice are thus important social structures for creating and sharing knowledge [3]. Members of a community of practice share an interest in a domain of activity or common endeavor. Brought together by this common interest, they collaborate and engage in a process of collective learning and, as a result, form bonds that give the community coherence. However, a community of practice is not a group of people who merely share a common interest. To become a community of practice, a group of people must be engaged with each other in a sustained and ongoing manner. Through interacting with one another in the pursuit of a common interest or enterprise, these people develop, adjust and “fine tune” their relations with the world and with each other. This collective learning results in common ways of engaging with the world and with each other. In short, it results in a shared practice. This shared practice reflects both the pursuit of a common endeavor and attendant social relations. Shared practices can thus be regarded as the property of the