Sharing Knowledge and Expertise: The CSCW View of Knowledge Management

From Offshore Operation to Onshore Simulator: Using Visualized Ethnographic Outcomes to Work with Systems Developers

“…For example, the researcher came to understand an artifact through the study of marine operators' cooperative work at sea. Most importantly, the idea of combining the material and non-material in relation to work practices can tell a story about the relations of artifacts as the non-material component of work practices [65][66][67]. Schmidt and Bansler ([33], p. 24) describe such an idea as follows:…”

Search for expertise : going beyond direct evidence

“…However, users do not always stop after finding that person, since there is no guarantee that they found an expert. Real-world and hence in many cases not fully automated search for expertise is a multi-step process involving reading several documents and meeting several persons by following all kinds of document and social path-ways (Ackerman et al, 2002). That imaginary, yet sensible and realistic activity, is exactly what we attempted to model.…”

“…It is not likely that reading only one document and consulting only one person is enough to completely satisfy a personal information need in the enterprise. The real-world user should realize that the expertise needed is partly contained in several retrieved documents and partly in the personal memory of several experts (Ackerman et al, 2002). Note that while modeling the expertise gathering process, we apply different techniques to concentrate the random walk around the most relevant documents, since we rely on the assumption that all sources of the same knowledge are located close to each other in expertise graphs.…”

“…For example, they can send the user to their colleagues in the same department who expectedly possess similar expertise. This "escalation phase" of expertise seeking, when people end up with experts not initially recommended by a system, but related to those, even crossing organizational boundaries, is common in enterprises according to recent user studies (Ackerman et al, 2002).…”

“…A practically usable expert finder should help not only to identify knowledgeable people, but also to select the most appropriate experts among them for a face-to-face contact (Ackerman et al, 2002). Since expert finding is a tool for improving organizational communication, it must be able to predict various features of a planned communication to help it be successful.…”