Using Peer-to-Peer Technology for Knowledge Sharing in Communities of Practices

Communities of Practices (CoPs) are informal structures within organizations that bind people together through informal relationships and the sharing of expertise and experience. As such, they are effective tools for the creation and sharing of organizational knowledge, and, increasingly, organizations are adopting them as part of their knowledge management strategies. In this paper, we examine the knowledge sharing characteristics and roles of CoPs and develop a peer-to-peer knowledge sharing architecture that matches the behavioral characteristics of the members of the CoPs. We also propose a peer-to-peer knowledge sharing tool called KTella that enables members of CoPs to voluntarily share and retrieve knowledge more effectively.