Objective: Increasingly, people work in socially networked environments. With growing adoption of enterprise social network technologies, supporting effective social community is becoming an important factor in organizational success.Background: Relatively few human factors methods have been applied to social connection in communities. Although team methods provide a contribution, they do not suit design for communities. Wenger's community of practice concept, combined with cognitive work analysis, provided one way of designing for community.Method: We used a cognitive work analysis approach modified with principles for supporting communities of practice to generate a new website design. Over several months, the community using the site was studied to examine their degree of social connectedness and communication levels.Results: Social network analysis and communications analysis, conducted at three different intervals, showed increases in connections between people and between people and organizations, as well as increased communication following the launch of the new design.Conclusion: In this work, we suggest that human factors approaches can be effective in social environments, when applied considering social community principles.Application: This work has implications for the development of new human factors methods as well as the design of interfaces for sociotechnical systems that have community building requirements.

New social networking and social web tools are becoming available and are easing the process of customizing online social environments for enterprises. With these developments, core design efforts have been extending beyond usability for individual users and are beginning to include notions of sociability for the engagement of communities of users. In an effort to make it easier to design for social engagement in an online social environment, the authors developed a domain-community model based on the communities-of-practice concept and the work domain analysis used in cognitive work analysis. Through a case study of University-Community Partnerships for Social Action Research, an international development leadership community of practice, the authors illustrate how the domain-community model could be used to design web components of an online social environment that integrate internal issues of social engagement and external issues of domain effectiveness. It is expected that this model can provide a basis for designers of online communities to more systematically account for social phenomena of collective efforts in a given work domain.

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Facebook, Twitter, Google, and the proliferation of mobile devices exemplify the social transformation the world is undergoing. In these large scale rapid changes, traditional tools are showing their limits. Complexity theory, self-organization, and adaptability show promise in understanding recent developments such as social networking. As a response, this paper outlines the challenges of designing for complex sociotechnical systems that support self-organization, adaptability, and learning. The Community of Practice (CoP) concept is shown to have strong fundamental alignment with complex sociotechnical systems design and offers a revealing social dimension to the challenges outlined. To illustrate this, several opportunities in complex sociotechnical systems design using the CoP perspective are discussed.

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