Social: Theories and Models - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 263

9.4.2.2 Communities of Practice
Another way is to view a set of people working with the same topic or task and
their social connections as a community of practice (e.g., Wenger 1998 ). These
communities can be seen in informal, recreational situations, such as party fishing
boats (personal observation), to formal work situations such as in Japanese
industry (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995 ), and the wide range in between. Work on
knowledge management and knowledge management systems has similar lessons
on how groups work to help each other.
This view of a community of practice encourages viewing the users as a
community rather than as a set of individuals. Thus, individual users might have a
problem, but the community may, as a group, have solved the problem.
This view suggests that it is important to encourage users to communicate and
to provide them with ways for them to interact over time, and to provide ways to
acknowledge contributions and expertise. This approach is increasingly being used
to help users help each other to solve a wide range of needs (e.g., Carroll et al.
2006 ; El Helou et al. 2008 ). Further comments and suggestions on how to apply
this approach are in the references and in the literature on communities of practice
and on knowledge management systems.
9.4.2.3 Static Models of Social Processes
Some of the most influential, interesting, and easily approachable models appear to
be network models of social processes. The earliest work in this area noted how
everyone was ''connected to everyone else by only six degrees'' (Travers and
Milgram 1969 ). That is, for every pair of people in the world, only five friendships
were necessary to connect them. This work has been perhaps discredited now (with
the answer that we do not actually know how well connected people are, but it
might be that close for most but not all people), but the idea of how people are
connected into a network remains a useful concept. It has been used to explain, for
example, why Silicon Valley is successful, because there are multiple connections
between people (Castilla et al. 2000 ). It has also been used to analyze the con-
nectivity within groups (Carley 1996 ).
These models are useful for system design in that they encourage you to keep in
mind the connections between people, and to support connections and appropriate
connections.
9.4.2.4 Dynamic Models of Social Processes
A more complex view of groups examines how the connections are formed and
used, and the processes within the groups. These descriptive theories provide
insights into how groups work and how to support them.