People can learn a lot through (collaborative) reflection at work: In organizations, staff debate experiences and due to issues every day, thus reflecting together and learning from each other. While this is desirable, it is often hindered by differences in time and space. Online discussions in community-like systems may provide a means to overcome this issue and enable staff to share experiences and learn from them. In this paper, we study two different data sets from two software systems to support online collaborative reflection in order to analyze what possible factors influence the occurrence of aspects of reflection in online discussions, like experiences, suggestions and learning. Our results include findings that partially approve existing models of (collaborative) reflection, but also others that add to or even challenge these models. Overall, we found that collaborative reflection may take different paths towards learning. From this we derive that facilitation mechanisms need to take up these paths, and that facilitation may be successful in different ways than anticipated from existing literature. We describe possible facilitation mechanisms and discuss their implementation.

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Exchange of experiences is a common means of informal learning in work places. Multiple organizations have discovered the benefits of actively supporting a community of practice to support this. We implemented a community of practice platform in two public administration organizations concerned with employment and experienced differences between the cases as well as difficulties during the implementation. After conducting a systematic analysis, we identified several influencing factors affecting the emergence of a community of practice. We propose a set of readiness indicators derived from this analysis, offering researchers and practitioners a tool to estimate the readiness of a public administration organization towards adopting communities of practice. CCS CONCEPTS • Applied computing → Enterprise information systems • Social and professional topics → Implementation management

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