Kennismanagement in een Virtuele Organisatie: zijn ingebedde 'online communities of practice' succesvoller dan uitsluitend virtuele?
9 mei 2006
(project 014-43-618)
Probleemstelling
Is a deliberate shaping of the mixture of virtual and 'real-life' interaction in online communities a crucial condition for diminishing the typical problems of knowledge sharing? Typical problems that increase the risk of failure are: a lack of trust between members, free rider behavior and a lack of stable membership. The project attempts to answer two questions: a) how often do these different problems emerge in online communities? And b) does a mixture of virtual and 'real-life' interaction of at least some members reduces the prevalence of the problems that the whole community faces? Since the mixture of virtual and 'real-life' interaction can be influenced, knowledge about the impact of the degree of embeddedness (question b) is an important input to the design and management of online communities. Knowledge about the prevalence of the different problems (question a) is crucial for focusing the knowledge management efforts in different types of online communities. A deliberate community design and community management can reduce the emergence of problems and make the online community more successful for all members.
Wetenschappelijk belang
The project addresses the question of to what extent real-life interaction can be replaced by virtual interaction. The crucial assumption of this project, and that will be tested, is that the complete replacement of real-life interaction by virtual interaction will increase the intensity of the problems that online communities face. The combination of virtual and real-life interaction can provide incentives for group members to become active. While experimental research has shown that communication is important for overcoming free rider problems in small virtual groups, this project provides insights about how to facilitate cooperation in larger international groups that are expected to interact voluntarily for a longer time on the Internet.
Maatschappelijk belang
Informal knowledge sharing groups have a large potential for the new economy. However, online communities that are based only on ICT have a high risk of failure. An active online community design and management can be useful for preventing this. Reaching the full potential of ICT for knowledge sharing is not only dependent on the extent of use of ICT, but also on how it is used and how it interacts with the management of human resources of the online community. The project will provide insights based on empirical tests about an important aspect of online community design. This will enable the shaping of online communities of practice so that they better reach their potential by planning ahead whether some members’ interaction will be purely virtual or embedded in interaction outside of the online community. This knowledge helps preventing that financial and human resources will be wasted. It makes possible to use the knowledge of members of virtual organizations more efficiently.
Methodiek
The project attempts to find out whether embedded online communities face less problems than purely virtual ones. It rests on a comparative analysis of the emergence of problems in about 50 online communities of an international virtual organization that is maintained by ICT-Noord Nederland and affiliated with ASTRON, the Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy. The virtual organization consists of international researchers from different research areas and from different countries inside and outside the European Union. They collaborate within different online communities. Online surveys will provide data to assess the prevalence of the different types of problems of information sharing and to assess the degree of embeddedness of the online communities. Additionally, archives of sent messages and other communication activities will be used to assess individual and group differences in the frequency of active participation of the members and membership stability. The survey measurements will partly make use of items used in recent research on Internet. The initial designing of the virtual organization and its online communities takes place in cooperation between the research team at the Department of Sociology and the maintainers of the virtual organization at ICT-Noord Nederland. This guarantees sufficient variation in the degree of embeddedness between the communities. Statistical multi-level analyses will be applied to assess individual and group differences in the prevalence of the different types of problems and their relationship with the degree of social embeddedness.
Onderzoekers
Prof. dr. R. Wittek; dr. U. Matzat en prof. dr. C. Snijders. Rijksuniversiteit Groningen; Faculteit der Gedrags- en Maatschappijwetenschappen en TU-Eindhoven; Department of Technology Management.
Resultaten
De resultaten van dit onderzoek zijn als pdf-file beschikbaar:
Tevens wordt verwezen naar de volgende resultaten uit 2005:
Articles
Matzat, U. Die Einbettung der Online-Interaktion in soziale Netzwerke der Offline-Welt. Möglichkeiten der sozialen Gestaltung von Online-Gruppen in Jäckel, Michael; Mai, Manfred: Online-Vergesellschaftung? Mediensoziologische Perpektiven auf neue Kommunikationstechnologien. Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden: 175-199
Matzat, U. Kennisdeling in Online groepen: de sociale inbedding van online interactie in offline relaties. The Social Embeddeness of Online Interaction of Offlline Relations in: De haan, Jos & Van der Laan, Jaarboek ICT en Samenleving 2005. Kennis in Netwerken. Boom, Amsterdam: 97-111
Conference presentations
Matzat, U. A theory of relational signals in online groups, presentation at the conference General Online Research, GOR 05, University of Zurich, Switzerland. 22 March 2005.
Matzat, U. The management of online communities. Social control and Relational Signals in Online Groups, invited talk at the Cosmos conference, Technical University of Munich, Germany. May 6, 2005
Matzat, U. The Social Embeddeness of Online Communities of practice. Presentation at the conference ICT, the knowledge Society and Changes in Work, Den Hague, The Netherlands. June 10, 2005
Matzat, U. A theory of relational signals in online groups, presentation at the 100th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Philadelphia, USA, August 13-16, 2005. Session: Theory as Wayfinding in Communication and Information Technology Research. Section on Communication and Information Technologies. August 13, 2005