Virtual Community of Practice: a Special Network of Knowledge Creation and Sharing Between Individuals and Groups

Nowadays new technologies represent complex communication channels that strongly support education and training activities inside organizations. Many organizations have used this technology to create spaces of virtual learning in which the geographic distance and face to face communication are no longer barriers to promote learning interactions. The intention of this paper is to analyze the operation of a Virtual Community of Practice (VCOP) that belongs to a private university that has several campus around Mexico country. The relations that exist along members of the VCOP, the existing strength between their ties in their social network as well as the relations of support (to share knowledge with respect to its processes) that they have, are analyzed in this paper. Given the nature of our research, we define it as an exploratory one. In order to obtain the data of the members of the VCOP a questionnaire divided in three different sections was design and applied to 30 people in charge of the human resources area. Each of these people belongs to one of 30 different campus of the organization that are distributed in five different zones around the country. We use the social networks approach to analyze the data. Our findings show that the relationships, information and knowledge that participants of the VCOP have, depend on their geographic location. We can infer then that a clusterization in the distribution of the information and knowledge exists. In this sense, it is a fact that all members of the network do not participate in a similar way and they do not contribute uniformly with his knowledge. The data reveal that strategic positions exist along the network and that particular members that occupy those positions represent a detonating that promotes participation. A significant difference exists along the participation of network members although this network member's participation is foster in a similar way. Another important finding that our study shows is the existence of a correlation between the support that a member of the VCOP offers to other members of the community and the people who this member knows. The results indicate strong support for the fact that the greater number of members of the VCOP somebody knows in a face to face relationship, the more support this member will give to them. Finally we propose a preliminary model based on the findings correlations items.