Virtual knowledge communities: lessons learned in making them work

Authors

  • Anne Hardon

Abstract

This case study analyses the development of three online communities, facilitated by KIT Information & Library Services. The development of these communities started in 2003, with the objective to exchange information with partners in developing countries on Information Management, Gender, Society and Development, and Sexual Health. A year later the platform was designed and online operations of the communities could start. After a pilot period of 20 weeks, an evaluation was carried out.

This article looks at the objectives behind the launch of these online communities, describes why the development took seven months, and discloses the evaluation results. It concludes with reasons why two of the three communities were closed down, explores whether this could have been prevented and draws the lessons learned from the exercise.

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Published

2005-06-23

Issue

Vol. 1 No. 1 (2005): Supporting communities in development

Section

Case studies

License

The copyright of the articles published in this journal remains the property of the authors. For liability reasons, the title belongs to the Foundation for the Support of the Knowledge Management for Development Journal. The journal is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike License. This journal is currently an open access journal as it has a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access. From the BOAI definition [1] of "open access", we support the rights of users to "read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles." However, some of the content (2009-2012) is only available on the Taylor and Francis website. Within the next few months, this issue too will become available on the OJS. [1] http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#openaccess