‘Structuring spontaneity’: investigating the impact of management practices on the success of virtual communities of practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the increasing number of virtual communities of practice (VCoPs), little is known about how organizations can help lead them to success. This paper aims to identify those management practices that are likely to increase their chance of success. Using an action research approach that brought together a multidisciplinary team of researchers, coaches and organizational participants, we closely followed the experiences of eight VCoPs over a six- to nine-month period and collected a large quantity of quantitative and qualitative data from many sources. Our results indicate that three types of management practices seem to have the most impact on a VCoP’s success: taking ongoing actions to develop a knowledge-sharing culture, providing adequate resources to the VCoPs, and monitoring the leadership of the community in order to address any occurring problems. This study represents a first step towards building an empirically based understanding of how organizations can sustain their VCoPs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.035 | 0.139 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".