The emergence and widespread adoption of the World Wide Web offers a lot of potential in supporting cross-platform collaborative working and knowledge sharing with widely-dispersed working groups.
Communities of practice (CoPs) of an informal nature span the boundaries of an organization and are likely conduits of external and innovative views into the organization. This is because CoPs enable person-to-person interaction and engage a whole group in advancing their field of practice.
The Chinese Group Training (CGT) Research and Training Programme on Integrated River Basin Management for Flood Control (IHE, 2000-2001) can be regarded as a distributed community of practice (CoP). The purpose of this community of professionals is to take advantage of the organizational knowledge cycle in order to disseminate and utilize the knowledge and skills acquired from IHE to enhance the capacity for flood control in China. The main goal of this study is therefore to build a web-based collaborative working environment to support the CoP. This will allow members to connect easily and to contribute and access the community. The CGT community consists of people of outstanding ability, experience, and professionalism. The CoP should develop by continuing to foster collaborative, innovative, and knowledge sharing culture.
Web-based support consists of a Web site (www.huaihe.ihe.nl) providing information about the subject area and a link to the collaboration platform. The BSCW Shared Workspace system was conceived as a platform which supports collaborative working through email and mailing lists, repositories in which users can upload documents, holding threaded discussions, and collaborative authoring of documents.
This study has concentrated on the investigation of different collaborative systems, applied concepts of knowledge management, and web design technologies to build a web-based knowledge platform. The purpose is to enhance collaboration, and facilitate knowledge sharing and flow. The lessons learned during the course of this study and guidelines that are favorable for further development of CoPs, are also presented.
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