TOWARD A METHODOGICAL FRAMEWORK TO SUPPORT PROFESSIONAL VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES

Abstract

The fast progress of information and communication infrastructures, especially networking technologies over the past few years, has offered new possibilities for the knowledge creation and sharing within organizations through the emergence of collaborative networks such: virtual community, community of practice, community of interest.... The CSCW tools or groupware are the famous tools to support these forms, in particular, can be deployed to help organizations manage their empiric knowledge more efficaciously. The complexity of CSCW tools is growing from classical workstation to capillary CSCW; however, current solutions usually are not very customisable and interoperable and are not utilizing the full potential of the community support idea. In our research; we have focused ourselves on virtual professional communities, and we are interested on the specification of a collaborative framework for supporting and sustaining the development of such communities. In this paper we introduced our architecture model for a generic community support platforms designed to fulfil all theirs requirements.