Designing Computational Places for Communities within Organizations

Abstract

The paper focuses on collaboration that is achieved inside communities thriving within organizations. The nature of the communities and their connections with the institutional technologies embedding the organizational prescriptions require the construction of places where the communities can construct and maintain their local memory, policies and conventions. The paper proposes a framework (i.e., a model and the related language) supporting the construction of such places (i.e., fulcra) and illustrates its use by means of a scenario derived from previous empirical investigations on communities of practice