It's been a while since my last post, but I took a much-needed summer break plus I was busy finishing a paper that was recently accepted. Last time we were down to 11 very good candidates for virtual communities exhibiting some CoP traits, namely a focus on a profession, a high volume of posting with low poster-to-post ratio, and a good fit of the core-periphery model.
The next step was to design a self-response online survey to ask participants about visible behaviors associated with Wenger's theory of CoPs. After piloting a first version of the questionnaire in a non-participating newsgroup, I published the revised instrument and sent 1706 invitations to distinct participants in the 11 newsgroups. I received 241 responses and was lucky to have 239 usable surveys.
Survey results revealed the presence in four of the newsgroups of all the dimensions Wenger describes for face-to-face CoPs: Mutual engagement, Joint enterprise, Shared repertoire, Community and Learning/Identity acquisition. Hence I concluded these four newsgroups could be considered Usenet-based CoPs.
The paper that came out of this study, co-authored with my doctoral supervisor Dr. David Spicer, was titled "Searching the Usenet network for virtual Communities of Practice". It was presented at the Academy of Management Meeting in 2007, and was selected for the best paper proceedings. It is available in Working Paper format from here.
