Integrating shared workspace, wiki and blog technologies to support interpersonal Knowledge Connection

Abstract

Nowadays, Concurrent Engineering generalised implementation within business and professional ecosystems requires new multidisciplinary and multi-site collaborative environments, methods and tools that could stimulate creativity and increase innovation opportunities. While the focus in the past was on how to improve processes within single organisations, the current business network dynamics render the old methods unusable. What is needed are the methods and tools to support interpersonal communication and interpersonal productivity in order to maintain a higher level of knowledge entropy that can eventually assist knowledge workers generating more ideas and therefore stimulates creativity. This paper presents a virtual space of networked individuals within on-line communities through the integration of several technologies, namely shared workspace, wikis, wikis and blogs, to better support interpersonal knowledge connection. While shared workspace technology has already been widely deployed to support project teams, very little has been done so far regarding the use of wiki and blog technologies in the context of supporting on-line communities (e.g. Wikipedia) of knowledge workers. Our main idea was to integrate those technologies together and to use the resulting collaborative environment as a knowledge networking instrument where fonnalised concepts and members' profile are key components to support people-concepts networking. Another aspect of this implementation is to be able to experiment new ways of connecting people and concepts together. There are already open source software components supporting hyper graph that could be used for navigating into people-concepts networks or maps where one can discover new relevant resources to collaborate with. This could lead to the design of a new open collaboration platfonn to stimulate creativity and innovation. The paper looks also into the open content licensing mode and its potential benefits into a collaborative working environment as a freedom element that spurs creativity and innovation. Overall, it is believed that this kind of technology integration could be providing much faster and broader access to existing knowledge and people knowhow, thus providing more opportunities or alternatives to professionals engaged into knowledge intensive work. Our approach is also to find a systematic way of collecting and analysing data in order to evaluate the impacts on interpersonal productivity, creativity and innovation within online collaboration sessions. After all, knowledge creation is a social activity that needs to be specifically addressed and supported within new collaborative working environments. The paper concludes by introducing a new scientific domain branded as "Knowledge Connection" which stands at the crossroads of existing scientific domains such as Knowledge Creation, Knowledge Representation and Visualisation, Collaborative Networks, and Computer Support for Collaborative Work.

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