Security policies for sharing knowledge in virtual communities

Knowledge management exploits the new opportunities of sharing knowledge among members of virtual communities in distributed computer networks, and knowledge-management systems are therefore modeled and designed as multiagent systems. In this paper, normative multiagent systems for secure knowledge management based on access-control policies are studied. It is shown how distributed access control is realized by means of local policies of access-control systems for documents of knowledge providers, and by means of global community policies regulating these local policies. Moreover, it is shown how such a virtual community of multiple knowledge providers respects the autonomy of the knowledge providers.     

Fostering the determinants of knowledge sharing in professional virtual communities

Professional virtual communities (PVCs), which are formed on the Internet, are expected to serve the needs of members for communication, information, and knowledge sharing. The executives of organizations should consider PVCs as a new innovation or knowledge pool since members share knowledge. However, many PVCs have failed due to members’ low willingness to share knowledge with other members. Thus, there is a need to understand and foster the determinants of members’ knowledge sharing behavior in PVCs. This study develops an integrated model designed to investigate and explain the relationships between contextual factors, personal perceptions of knowledge sharing, knowledge sharing behavior, and community loyalty. Empirical data was collected from three PVCs and tested using structural equation modeling (SEM) to verify the fit of the hypothetical model. The results show that trust significantly influences knowledge sharing self-efficacy, perceived relative advantage and perceived compatibility, which in turn positively affect knowledge sharing behavior. Furthermore, the study finds that the norm of reciprocity does not significantly affect knowledge sharing behavior. The results of the study can be used to identify the motivation underlying individuals’ knowledge sharing behavior in PVCs. By investigating the impacts of contextual factors and personal perceptions on knowledge sharing behavior, the integrated model better explains behavior than other proposed models. This study might help executives of virtual communities and organizations to manage and promote these determinants of knowledge sharing to stimulate members’ willingness to share knowledge and enhance their virtual community loyalty. As only little empirical research has been conducted on the impact of knowledge sharing self-efficacy, perceived relative advantage, and perceived compatibility on the individual’s knowledge sharing behavior in PVCs, the empirical evidence reported here makes a valuable contribution in this highly important area.     

Adaptive notifications to support knowledge sharing in close-knit virtual communities

Social web-groups where people with common interests and goals communicate, share resources, and construct knowledge, are becoming a major part of today’s organisational practice. Research has shown that appropriate support for effective knowledge sharing tailored to the needs of the community is paramount. This brings a new challenge to user modelling and adaptation, which requires new techniques for gaining sufficient understanding of a virtual community (VC) and identifying areas where the community may need support. The research presented here addresses this challenge presenting a novel computational approach for community-tailored support underpinned by organisational psychology and aimed at facilitating the functioning of the community as a whole (i.e. as an entity). A framework describing how key community processes—transactive memory (TM), shared mental models (SMMs), and cognitive centrality (CCen)—can be utilised to derive knowledge sharing patterns from community log data is described. The framework includes two parts: (i) extraction of a community model that represents the community based on the key processes identified and (ii) identification of knowledge sharing behaviour patterns that are used to generate adaptive notifications. Although the notifications target individual members, they aim to influence individuals’ behaviour in a way that can benefit the functioning of the community as a whole. A validation study has been performed to examine the effect of community-adapted notifications on individual members and on the community as a whole using a close-knit community of researchers sharing references. The study shows that notification messages can improve members’ awareness and perception of how they relate to other members in the community. Interesting observations have been made about the linking between the physical and the VC, and how this may influence members’ awareness and knowledge sharing behaviour. Broader implications for using log data to derive community models based on key community processes and generating community-adapted notifications are discussed.     

Visualization analysis of the development trajectory of knowledge sharing in virtual communities based on CiteSpace

Studies on knowledge sharing (KS) in virtual communities (VCs) have indicated several limitations, such as chaotic literature information, interdisciplinarity complexity, and evolution vagueness. In this study, literature on KS in VCs is obtained from the database of Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection during 2002 to 2017. CiteSpace technology based on Java platform is applied to develop the visualization analysis of the development trajectory, and summarize the research distribution, intellectual base and evolution path of how KS in VCs has been studied. Results show that the quantitative development of literature on KS in VCs has undergone three stages, and China, USA, South Korea have led the research of this area. Moreover, the intellectual base is social capital, social cognitive theory, and behavior, motivation, quantity and quality of KS. In addition, the evolution path has gone through two stages: Firstly, the trajectory of development during 2002 to 2014 is concept definition, VCs platform, and factors influencing KS. Secondly, from the perspective of individuals, teams and organizations, the factors including social capital, trust, and self-efficiency have been stressed during 2015 to 2017. It provides the research trajectories and future research directions for authors.

     

Personality traits and knowledge sharing in online communities

Adopting diffusion theory and the concept of social value orientation, the effects of personality traits on knowledge sharing in a virtual open content community are investigated. In addition to the main effects of personality, it was hypothesized that intrinsic motivations would moderate the effects on knowledge sharing. A sample of N = 256 active users of Wikipedia provided measures of personality, motivation, and knowledge sharing. Latent regression analyses support the notion that authorship of Wikipedia is associated with higher levels of trendsetting and a prosocial value orientation. Moreover, moderation analyses demonstrate that the effect of the latter is moderated by individual differences in motivations to write. Differences with regard to opinion leadership could not be confirmed.     

Describing functional requirements for knowledge sharing communities

Human collaboration in distributed knowledge sharing groups depends on the functionality of information and communication technologies (ICT) to support performance. Since many of these dynamic environments are constrained by time limits, knowledge must be shared efficiently by adapting the level of information detail to the specific situation. This paper focuses on the process of knowledge and context sharing with and without mediation by ICT, as well as issues to be resolved when determining appropriate ICT channels. Both technology-rich and non-technology examples are discussed.     

Describing functional requirements for knowledge sharing communities

Human collaboration in distributed knowledge sharing groups depends on the functionality of information and communication technologies (ICT) to support performance. Since many of these dynamic environments are constrained by time limits, knowledge must be shared efficiently by adapting the level of information detail to the specific situation. This paper focuses on the process of knowledge and context sharing with and without mediation by ICT, as well as issues to be resolved when determining appropriate ICT channels. Both technology-rich and non-technology examples are discussed.     

Determinants of knowledge seeking in professional virtual communities

As knowledge management systems within organisations, professional virtual communities (PVCs) are popular knowledge-seeking tools, which bring together geographically dispersed members from outside of the organisations. An increasing number of employees use PVCs for knowledge seeking, knowledge exchange and problem solving at work. Why do members choose to receive knowledge from other community members in PVCs needs to be understood. This paper extends Ajzen's [1991. The theory of planned behaviour. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50 (2), 179–211] theory of planned behaviour to elicit external beliefs in terms of personal motivation, as well as technological and social factors, and to examine the relative importance of these factors. According to this study's online survey of 323 members in three PVCs, the results show that the significance of beliefs, such as system quality, compatibility, trust, knowledge growth and knowledge quality, in creating positive attitudes towards knowledge seeking. Community identification is shown as a salient belief for the subjective norms of knowledge seeking. System quality and resource availability are revealed as important determinants for perceived behavioural control of knowledge seeking. Knowledge-seeking intention is based on the attitude towards knowledge seeking and the subjective norm of knowledge seeking, whereas knowledge-seeking behaviour is solely determined by knowledge-seeking intention. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Trust and knowledge sharing in diverse global virtual teams

Global virtual teams (GVTs) allow organizations to improve productivity, procure global knowledge, and transfer best practice information instantaneously among team members. GVTs rely heavily on IT and have little face-to-face interaction, thereby increasing problems resulting from geographic barriers, time language, and cultural differences, and inter-personal relationships. The purpose of our study was to design a normative framework that would assist organizations in understanding the relationship between diversity, mutual trust, and knowledge sharing among GVTs, with additional focus on understanding the moderating impact of collaborative technology and task characteristics. Empirical data was collected from 58 GVTs and analyzed using a Hierarchical Multiple Regression technique. Results showed that in GVTs, deep level diversity has a more significant relationship with team processes of mutual trust and knowledge sharing than visible functional level diversity. This relationship is moderated by the collaborative capabilities of available technology and levels of interdependence of the task. Furthermore, knowledge sharing and mutual trust mediate the relationship between diversity levels and team effectiveness.     

Factors affecting members' trust belief and behaviour intention in virtual communities

In this research we investigate whether antecedent factors of participant trust and institutional trust significantly influence members' trust belief towards virtual communities. Further, we investigate how members' trust levels affect their behaviour intention. A model of factors that affect members' trust in virtual communities is constructed. We analysed 625 valid online questionnaires obtained from virtual communities related to travel, games, and computer information. The findings suggest that benefit attraction and shared value have significant positive effects on building participant trust, and monitoring has a significant positive effect on building institutional trust. Trust building influences both members' stickiness in virtual communities and their willingness to share information. This research suggests that the extent to which members trust community-based website environments significantly influences their practical behaviour in such environments.     

Using peer-to-peer technology for knowledge sharing in communities of practices

Communities of Practices (CoPs) are informal structures within organizations that bind people together through informal relationships and the sharing of expertise and experience. As such, they are effective tools for the creation and sharing of organizational knowledge, and an increasing number of organizations are adopting them as part of their knowledge management strategies. In this paper, we examine the knowledge sharing characteristics and roles of CoPs and develop a peer-to-peer knowledge sharing architecture that matches the behavioral characteristics of the members of the CoPs. We also propose a peer-to-peer knowledge sharing tool called KTella that enables a community's members to voluntarily share and retrieve knowledge more effectively.     

Conference assistant system for supporting knowledge sharing in academic communities

This paper describes our ongoing attempts to build a communityware system by presenting a project of providing digital assistants to support participants in an academic conference. We provided participants at the conference with a personal assistant system with mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies and facilitated communication among the participants. We also made online services available via the Web to encourage the participants to continue their relationships even after the conference. In this paper, we show the system we provided for the project and report the results.     

Predicting knowledge sharing practices through intention: A test of competing models

In knowledge management (KM)-related research, effective knowledge sharing is considered to be one of the most critical components of KM success. For the present research, the authors conducted a longitudinal, two-phased study to evaluate if the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) and three variations of the Theory of Planned Behavior—namely, TPB, decomposed TPB (DTPB), and revised TPB (RTPB)—can adequately predict knowledge sharing behaviors. The first TRA-based study shows a severe limitation in the ability of the intention to predict actual knowledge sharing behaviors collected from a knowledge management platform. In a subsequent study, three variations of TPB-based models were employed to show that, although the independent variables (i.e., attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavior control that is decomposed into controllability and self-efficacy) give satisfactory explanations of variance in intention (R² > 42%), the intention–behavior gap still exists in each of the three models. Only the perceived self-efficacy in the revised TPB can directly predict knowledge sharing behaviors. This gap highlights the importance of knowledge sharing as a fundamentally social activity for which the actualization of intention into actions may be interrupted due to barriers such as a mistake-free culture or others’ deliberate misinterpretations that may in turn cause unanticipated negative consequences to the person. The theoretical implication of this study is that in applying TPB to study knowledge sharing practices, researchers must focus on control beliefs that reflect people’s capacity to overcome possible environmental challenges encountered in carrying out their knowledge sharing intentions.     

A fuzzy trust evaluation method for knowledge sharing in virtual enterprises

The success of virtual enterprises (VEs) depends on the effective sharing of related resources between various enterprises or workers who perform related activities. Specifically, VE success hinges on the integration and sharing of information and knowledge. Trust is an important facilitator of knowledge sharing. However, the trustworthiness of a peer is a vague concept that is dynamic and that often shifts over time or with environmental changes. This study designs a trust-based knowledge-sharing model based on characteristics of VEs and the knowledge structure model to express knowledge associated with VE activities. Subsequently, the factors that affect the trust evaluation are identified based on the characteristics of trust and VEs. Finally, this study develops a knowledge sharing, decision-making framework in which a fuzzy trust evaluation method for sharing knowledge is proposed based on VE activities and the interactions among workers in allied enterprises. The method consists of three sub-methods, including an activity correlation evaluation method, a current trust evaluation method, and an integral trust evaluation method. Under the premises of secure VE knowledge and reasonable access authorization, the proposed knowledge-sharing method provides the trust level between a knowledge-requesting enterprise and a knowledge-supplying enterprise to improve the willingness of the latter to share more valuable knowledge, ultimately increasing the efficiency and competitiveness of VEs.     

A fuzzy trust evaluation method for knowledge sharing in virtual enterprises

The success of virtual enterprises (VEs) depends on the effective sharing of related resources between various enterprises or workers who perform related activities. Specifically, VE success hinges on the integration and sharing of information and knowledge. Trust is an important facilitator of knowledge sharing. However, the trustworthiness of a peer is a vague concept that is dynamic and that often shifts over time or with environmental changes. This study designs a trust-based knowledge-sharing model based on characteristics of VEs and the knowledge structure model to express knowledge associated with VE activities. Subsequently, the factors that affect the trust evaluation are identified based on the characteristics of trust and VEs. Finally, this study develops a knowledge sharing, decision-making framework in which a fuzzy trust evaluation method for sharing knowledge is proposed based on VE activities and the interactions among workers in allied enterprises. The method consists of three sub-methods, including an activity correlation evaluation method, a current trust evaluation method, and an integral trust evaluation method. Under the premises of secure VE knowledge and reasonable access authorization, the proposed knowledge-sharing method provides the trust level between a knowledge-requesting enterprise and a knowledge-supplying enterprise to improve the willingness of the latter to share more valuable knowledge, ultimately increasing the efficiency and competitiveness of VEs.     

A value frequency model of knowledge sharing: an exploratory study on knowledge sharability in cross-organizational collaboration

Collaborators on cross-disciplinary, cross-organizational teams must decide what knowledge is sharable. The sharability of a set of private knowledge is defined as the degree to which one feels willing to reveal that knowledge to people who are not members of one’s own organizational unit. This paper proposes a Value Frequency Model of Knowledge Sharing (VFMKS) to explain knowledge sharability attitudes and knowledge sharing behaviors. It reports qualitative findings from an exploratory field study of the degree to which constructs and relationships proposed by the model were consistent with the attitudes, opinions, and reported actions of professional Chief Knowledge Officers (CKO) from 16 organizations in France. CKO’s were consistent with most aspects of the model, suggesting quantitative investigation of the model may be useful. Critical incidents and utterances of the CKO’s did not address two constructs in the model during this study. Further investigation may show whether these effects manifest in other contexts, or whether they are extraneous to the model.     

An information security knowledge sharing model in organizations

Knowledge sharing plays an important role in the domain of information security, due to its positive effect on employees' information security awareness. It is acknowledged that security awareness is the most important factor that mitigates the risk of information security breaches in organizations. In this research, a model has been presented that shows how information security knowledge sharing (ISKS) forms and decreases the risk of information security incidents. The Motivation Theory and Theory of Planned Behavior besides Triandis model were applied as the theoretical backbone of the conceptual framework. The results of the data analysis showed that earning a reputation, and gaining promotion as an extrinsic motivation and curiosity satisfaction as an intrinsic motivation have positive effects on employees' attitude toward ISKS. However, self-worth satisfaction does not influence ISKS attitude. In addition, the findings revealed that attitude, perceived behavioral control, and subjective norms have positive effects on ISKS intention and ISKS intention affects ISKS behavior. The outcomes also showed that organizational support influences ISKS behavior more than trust. The results of this research should be of interest to academics and practitioners in the domain of information security.     

A knowledge grid model and platform for global knowledge sharing

This paper proposes a knowledge grid model for sharing and managing globally distributed knowledge resources. The model organizes knowledge in a three-dimensional knowledge space, and provides a knowledge grid operation language, KGOL. Internet users can use the KGOL to create their knowledge grids, to put knowledge to them, to edit knowledge, to partially or wholly open their grids to all or some particular grids, and to get the required knowledge from the open knowledge of all the knowledge grids. The model enables people to conveniently share knowledge with each other when they work on the Internet. A software platform based on the proposed model has been implemented and used for knowledge sharing in research teams.     

Understanding OSS development in communities: the perspectives of ideology and knowledge sharing

This study aims to understand why open source software (OSS) developers contribute and how their dispersed efforts are controlled to lead to viable outputs. Drawing on theories related to ideology and information sharing, a model is proposed and tested empirically. We found that OSS values are positively associated with collaborative elaboration and communication competence, which in turn affect the performance of OSS task in terms of task completion. Our results also delineate the relationship among OSS norms, collaborative elaboration and source credibility, and task completion. This research contributes to advancing theoretical understanding of OSS performance as well as providing OSS practitioners with guidelines on how OSS communities use OSS ideology to achieve better performance.