Collaborative Knowledge Networks Research Articles

The Chronicles of Me: Understanding Blogging as a Religious Practice

Blogs represent an especially interesting site of online religious communication. Analysis of the content of 200 blogs with mentions of topics related to Christianity, as well as interviews of a subset of these bloggers, suggests that blogs provide an integrative experience for the faithful, not a “third place,” but a melding of the personal and the communal, the sacred and the profane. Religious bloggers operate outside the realm of the conventional nuclear church as they connect and link to mainstream news sites, other nonreligious blogs, and online collaborative knowledge networks such as Wikipedia. By chronicling how they experience faith in their everyday lives, these bloggers aim to communicate not only to their communities and to a wider public but also to themselves. This view of blogging as a contemplative religious experience differs from the popular characterization of blogging as a trivial activity.

Designing sticky knowledge networks

Much of any organization's experience and expertise remains underused and underexploited simply because it resides not in databases, repositories, or manuals but in the minds of its employees. Attempting to harness such distributed expertise, organizations have begun implementing collaborative knowledge networks---peer-to-peer digital networks connecting individuals with relevant expertise to their peers who need it [10, 11]. Unfortunately, however, successful knowledge networks represent the occasional island dotting a sea of failures. While many organizations are eager adopters of knowledge network systems, individual users frequently abandon them, leaving a trail of million- dollar paperweights. To be self-sustaining, knowledge networks must be sticky, though stickiness is an elusive design objective.

Multi‐level complexity in the management of knowledge networks

While it is widely acknowledged that economic growth is now dependent on the realization of a knowledge based economy, there remains much confusion as to how this is actualized. Effective management of knowledge is endorsed as an essential element for organizational survival and competitive advantage, yet again, the ways in which knowledge moves through knowledge networks remains poorly understood. This paper is the result of a three‐year qualitative investigation of the dynamic relationships among knowledge creation, diffusion, and utilization occurring in situ in a collaborative knowledge network. In an attempt to better understand how knowledge unfolds in such a system, this paper explores emergent patterns, not only within individual, group, organizational and inter‐organizational levels of learning, but also among them. Two theoretical models acknowledging the multi‐level complexity of knowledge management in organizations while simultaneously identifying the common influences among them, are presented. In combination, it is then possible develop a theoretical framework through which to better understand the relationships among knowledge creation, diffusion, and utilization in collaborative knowledge networks, and thereby, optimize the utility of knowledge designed for organizational application.