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Currently, two modelsof innovation are prevalent in organization science. The "private investment" model assumes returns to the innovator resultfsu private goods andef ficient regimesof intellectual property protection. The "collective action" model assumes that under conditionsof market f ailure, innovators collaborate in order to produce a public good. The phenomenonof open sourcesofc are development shows that users program to solve their own as well as shared technical problems, andfd./( reveal their innovations without appropriating private returnsftu selling thesofL are. In this paper, we propose that open sourcesofc are development is an exemplarof a compound "private-collective" modelof innovation that contains elementsof both the private investment and the collective action models and canof f society the "bestof both worlds" under many conditions. We describe a new setof research questions this model raisesfi scholars in organization science.

Ontocopi, a tool for identifying communities of practice by analyzing ontologies of relevant working domains. Ontocopi spots patterns in ontological formal relations, traversing the ontology from instance to instance via selected relations.

www.ifsm.umbc.edu/onlinecommunities Little attention has focused so far on evaluating the success of online communities. This paper starts to identify some key determinants of sociability and usability that help to determine their success. Determinants of sociability include obvious measures such as the number of participants in a community, the number of messages per unit of time, members ’ satisfaction, and some less obvious measures such as amount of reciprocity, the number of on-topic messages, trustworthiness and several others. Measures of usability include numbers of errors, productivity, user satisfaction and others. The list is not exhaustive but it is intended to provide a starting point for research on this important topic that will lead to develop of metrics. To avoid creating false impressions it is advisable to use several measures and to triangulate with qualitative data, particularly from ethnographic studies. 1

A contemporary approach to describing and theorizing about joint human endeavor is to posit “knowledge in common ” as a basis for awareness and coordination. Recent analysis has identified weaknesses in this approach even as it is typically employed in relatively simple task contexts. We suggest that in realistically complex circumstances, people share activities and not merely concepts. We describe a framework for understanding joint endeavor in terms of four facets of activity awareness: common ground, communities of practice, social capital, and human development. We illustrate the sort of analysis we favor with a scenario from emergency management, and consider implications and future directions for system design and empirical methods. 1.

One of the most challenging problems facing builders and facilitators of community networks is to create and sustain social engagement among members. In this paper, we investigate the drivers of social engagement in a community network through the analysis of three data sources: activity logs, a member survey, and the content analysis of the conversation archives. We describe three important ways to encourage and support social engagement in online communities: through system design elements such as conversation channeling and event notification, by various selection criteria for community members, and through facilitation of specific kinds of discussion topics.

This paper challenges some of the assumptions underlying the metadata creation process in the context of two communities of practice, based around learning object repositories and open e-Print archives. The importance of quality assurance for metadata creation is discussed and evidence from the literature, from the practical experiences of repositories and archives, and from related research and practices within other communities is presented. Issues for debate and further investigation are identified, formulated as a series of key research questions. Although there is much work to be done in the area of quality assurance for metadata creation, this paper represents an important first step towards a fuller understanding of the subject.

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Abstract. Wikis are successful tools for collaborative information collection. Wikis are becoming popular knowledge management tools, but do not fully support the requirements for such tools, namely structured search and knowledge reuse. Adding semantic annotations to Wikis helps to address these limitations by offering advanced information access (navigation and querying) and allowing knowledge reuse (through embedded queries and semantic information exchange). We present an architecture for Semantic Wikis and present our prototype SemperWiki. 1

: Traditionally, collaborative technologies are intended to directly support joint, collaborative activity, taking their cues from communication and media. Here, empirical findings are presented about the types of information needs associated with the formation of a knowledge-building community among professional learning technology researchers. Several issues are outlined in designing, facilitating, supporting, and measuring knowledge-building activity in such a community of practice. It is argued that, rather than communication tools, a knowledge-building community is better served by knowledge-networking tools that support individual information needs (both social and topical) relevant to participating in the community. Introduction Finding a professional connection with a colleague seems like a simple task but can devour hours of time. An anecdote illustrates why this is hard. A researcher whom we'll call David got a call with a question about research on interactive toys. David ...