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From the academic model of innovation-led organisations presented in Chapter 2, it is possible to identify three key areas that a KM architecture for such organisations must address: organisational awareness, community (of interest) formation and maintenance and information push, or communication. Awareness,

at its simplest, is about how to bring people together how to link people with

others and with communities, that share similar interests [Hattori99]. The challenge awareness poses for a software tool is that people with similar interests often do not communicate about these interests because they are unaware of the relationship. As a result, many topics that people share an interest in remain unexplored [Carter03]. Peer-to-peer Inter-Personal Awareness Devices such as Proem [Korteum01] offer a partial solution, but can only introduce people that are

physically proximate. If two individuals never meet, or only do so before they have picked up similar interests, they will not be made aware of each other.

Centrally maintained social network representations can enhance awareness of relationships with those beyond an individual s immediate social circle. They can be invoked step-by-step, as Nardi suggests, to enable indirect contact with an individual, or simply quoted to that person directly as a token of social introduction [Kautz97]. ReferralWeb can identify intensional networks to a named individual, but this requires that the user already know the identity of the specific person that they should contact. ONTOCOPI offers a predicted CoP, but still the user must be able to provide the identity of someone closely associated with the field. As the importance has been stressed of ensuring that CoPs are readily accessible by the wider organisation, a better solution would combine network visualisation with traditional expert finder capability to allow social chains to any individual sharing a particular interest to be identified. Clark, Monk and Dahlbom have argued the importance of common ground and shared practice, but this is not addressed by any of the tools surveyed. A straightforward mechanism should be provided by which the user can be made aware of individuals that share common ground with themselves and have expertise or interest in another specified area.

Regarding community, two issues merit particular consideration: the ease with which new communities can be established and the extent to which existing communities are integrated into the wider organisation. Koch s experience with Drehscheibe suggests that users are reluctant to seed new communities electronically if they feel that doing so will publicly disrupt some established order or hierarchy. As communities of interest are often formed speculatively, or out of curiosity [Cornejo03], it is vital not only to ensure that the procedure involved is not too onerous, but also that the perceived commitment required is

physical world, probably the lowest-effort, lowest-commitment way to communicate, raise awareness of and gauge interest in an idea is to pin simply- produced paper flyers to bulletin boards.

As Geyer and Cheng [Geyer02] point out, communities follow a natural progression from speculative communication, through initial open, fluid, team building and gradual refinement of focus, to formal project group with stable membership. This progression is neglected by the tools surveyed; none offer any means to classify the stage of development of a community. Once formalised, it is important that the community remain integrated with the wider organisation. Carter et al. found that members of groups tend to have strong connections to

other members of the same group but significantly weaker connections to other

groups in their same organisation. This holds even when the other groups work on related issues or are related to the core group through an organisational

construct [Carter03]. We have argued that innovation depends on the

integration of knowledge across disparate social communities . Therefore, any system that exacerbates this situation, by encouraging internal boundary formation or Balkanization, or reinforcing tribal identity, will be counter-productive, yet in

the tools surveyed community membership is characterised by a binary model in

other words, you are either in, or out.

In reality, however they might present themselves to outsiders, communities of interest are not single-minded monoliths and individuals involvements with them are not defined by absolute subscription to a collective mission statement or umbrella title. Rather, they are focal points of individual interest and ambition; individuality of each member is preserved even in one community. That is, each member can have diverse objectives, even if all members

share common interests in general [Hattori99]. A richer model of CoI

involvement will reflect the individuality of each member and the shared common interests , exposing both to the wider organisation.

As a community is formalised, the balance of information flow shifts. It evolves from a body predominantly concerned with compiling information from external sources to one that more often selectively communicates internally generated information. To increase awareness of community activities, the system should support the creation of community information bulletins that can be addressed to all individuals with relevant interests. Though much organisational communication takes place in the electronic domain, it has been argued that physical, face-to-face meetings are a more effective way to communicate ideas between individuals that have different professional backgrounds or interests. Again, in the physical world, open meetings and workshops are advertised by printed flyers; the system should support an analogous mechanism to promote these events electronically. Echoing some of the issues that Bellotti identified in her email use evaluation, NuggetMine users articulated the need for a temporal component to posted messages, requesting that it be possible to set an expiration date , so that messages relevant only until a certain date (e.g. a conference, a local event) would disappear after that date [Goecks02]. However, while out-of- date messages should be cleared to minimise clutter, it was also noted that current

messages should be readily available to late joiners [Geyer02] in other words,

the recipients of a message should not only be determined when the message is posted, but re-evaluated continually while it remains valid.

Messages may also be used as pointers to other information sources. Fischer and Ostwald observed that pre-existing documents may be brought to community discussions to ground shared understanding [Fischer03]. Groupcast and Nuggetmine demonstrated that users will also exploit community-based KM tools as a public forum for exchange of personal what s cool messages, such as URL recommendations, that may be outwith the scope of any community involvement. One kind of individual communication can, however, be disregarded: as Koch observed, additional mechanisms for private person-to- person electronic communication are not desirable as this is adequately supported