Linking knowledge management with network management: designing the framework for monitoring of virtual communities

Abstract

With emergence of Internet, considerate part of human interaction moved to virtual medium. Along with this process, ever-improving social technologies foster emergence and expansion of virtual communities aimed at leisure communication, professional networking or even focused on tackling relevant social issues. However, in order to achieve expected outputs of virtual activities some challenges are being met. These challenges can be illustrated as triangle-shaped system consisting of three equally important apexes: knowledge management, network management, and social technologies (as means ensuring reciprocal interaction of the latters). Harmonization and balance of these apexes could contribute to improved process and outcomes of leadership and management of online projects. Our research strives to develop a framework that could be used as an instrument to monitor virtual communities. Such tool could benefit initiators/managers of both closed and open virtual communities in measuring current activities within network, monitoring the progress and consequently making decisions on further development of online projects. Analysis of scientific literature on operation and management of networks, knowledge management, collective intelligence, co-creation of value lead us to identification of conceptual framework layers and elements. The primary testing of the framework was applied by observing a number of virtual community projects. We limited our empirical study to 18 Lithuanian virtual community projects oriented towards tackling local, national or even global social issues, as content of such projects usually is available publically. The proposed framework joints a number of elements that matches domains of knowledge management, management in network and social technologies. However, it requires further development, which should result in explicit guidelines for framework application.