On the Use of Actor-Network Theory for Developing Web Services Dedicated to Communities of Practice

Communities of practices are more and more recognized by companies, individuals and groups as valuable places to share and create knowledge. Communities of practice have to be cultivated in order to fully create the value they may bring to their environment. They need interoperable, flexible, ubiquitous, and specific collaborative tools to support their work. Developing such tools and enabling their use among communities of practice requires adopting a Participatory Design approach. Actor Network Theory (ANT) is then used to define a methodology that fosters the participation of heterogeneous stakeholders to the design process. As a case study, we show that ANT concepts are useful to analyse the design context of an European project named PALETTE that aims at developing interoperable services for helping communities of practices to better cultivate themselves