Towards Self-Organizing Communities in Peer-to-Peer Knowledge Management

Recently, many researchers and practitioners have been working at the intersection of knowledge management, peer-to-peer, and online social networks. Results include concrete applications such as P2P knowledge sharing or collaboration platforms on the web (wikis, folksonomy tools). On the other hand, a lot of analyses and models are available that aim at explaining the processes that govern the emergence and selforganization of social networks and their resulting properties, which have proven to be effective in spreading information among the members of the network. From these different perspectives, this position paper outlines the vision of self-organized P2P knowledge management. We point out building blocks which are already available, some of the challenges, and possible solutions.