Simulating Collective Intelligence of the Communities of Practice Using Agent-Based Methods

The modern organizations are facing problems which have caused them to lose personnel. Losing people, the organizations lose knowledge. One of the solutions is to collaborate and share knowledge across time and distance. Knowledge sharing in communities has attracted attention in fields like knowledge management or sociology, in both research and practice. Inter-organizational forms of network organizations are more and more accentuated. The paper focuses on the communities of practice within organizations and how through these communities collective intelligence is stimulated. First, we present the concept of communities of practice and show how multi-agent systems can simulate the behavior of complex systems composed of distinct components. Then we highlight the importance of collective intelligence in communities of practice and suggest a way to model communities of practice's dynamics. The main objective of the paper is to simulate collective intelligence capacity using agent-based models, and more specifically, the team of knowledge workers formation.