Collaboration and knowledge sharing in network organizations

Expert Systems with Applications Expert Systems with Applications 31 (2006) 715–727 www.elsevier.com/locate/eswa

Collaboration and knowledge sharing in network organizations Fla´via Maria Santoro b

a,*

, Marcos R.S. Borges b, Erick A. Rezende

b

a DIA-UNIRIO and Graduate Program in Informatics NCE&IM/UFRJ, Brazil Graduate Program in Informatics NCE&IM, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Abstract A network organization comprises a new type of environment around which people organize themselves so as to reach a common objective. A network organization enables the recommended interaction among people with different backgrounds, which happens when the problems they deal with are complex and multidisciplinary. Most network organizations require interactions in a geographically distributed fashion, fostering the serious challenge of displaying coherence of purpose necessary for global efficacy as from local activity: these features require an environment with special functionality. This paper describes and analyzes a collaborative environment for support to knowledge sharing and coordination of actions in geographically distributed network organizations. A case-study using the collaborative environment is presented, and the results obtained by using this environment are discussed. Ó 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Network organizations; Knowledge sharing; Coordination; Collaboration

1. Introduction A network organization can be defined as an environment around which people organize themselves to attain a common objective (Sailer, 1978). This type of organization started to gain prominence at the beginning of the 90’s and the last decade’s advances in network services, such as the Internet and the World Wide Web, have enabled the interaction support required by this type of organization. Thereafter, a great number of civil society entities have been organized in networks, namely those focused on several sectors, such as women’s rights, the fight against poverty, and child abuse, just to cite a few examples. The network paradigm can be defined as a strategic organizational response to those dynamic environmental pressures, providing an incentive to devolve and disaggregate business functions to specialist partners in collabora*

Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: fl[email protected] (F.M. Santoro), [email protected] (M.R.S. Borges), [email protected] (E.A. Rezende). 0957-4174/$ - see front matter Ó 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2006.01.002

tions and alliances (Cravens, Piercy, & Shipp, 1996). The network paradigm is an active area in organizational research (Borgatti & Foster, 2003; Franke, 1999) and sociology (Castells, 1996). There are several views of a network organization. A behavioral view of a network organization is a social relations pattern over a set of persons, positions, groups, or organizations (Sailer, 1978). A strategic view of a network organization considers it as ‘‘long term purposeful arrangements among distinct but related for-profit organizations, which allow those firms therein to gain or sustain competitive advantage’’ (Jarillo, 1988). Whatever the view ascribed to a network organization, they all have in common the need to manage their members’ knowledge so that their goals may be achieved with minimum effort. Some basic network organization characteristics can be observed in face-to-face activities, but not when geographically distributed. Due to the lack of appropriate technological support, these organizations cannot often operate as networks when their members work at a distance, thereby reducing their potential efficiency. The combination of a distributed environment with non-traditional coordination structures renders this support an interesting problem.

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This paper describes the use of a collaborative social and technical environment to support knowledge sharing and action coordination in geographically distributed networks, aiming at improving network organizations performance. We claim that network organization characteristics require new forms of technological support, different from those used by traditional organizations. We are particularly interested in those network organizations wherein participants are volunteers and do not follow a traditional hierarchy; moreover, our target organizations are those with few resources to support an expensive technological infrastructure. Network organizations allow for the interaction of people with various backgrounds, with a common objective, especially when the problems that hinder the achievement of this objective are complex and multidisciplinary. In most cases these network organizations are geographically dispersed, requiring people to interact from a distance. To improve the performance of these organizations, it is necessary either to increase the number of participants, or to improve the performance of those who already participate. The challenge is achieving this improvement without the managing mechanisms found in traditional organizations. The proposed environment aims in a manner at promoting some type of social inclusion. The lack of a formal structure limits technology access to network organizations; with the proposed environment, organizations with little capital can use the Web technology to help their coordination efforts towards a common goal, as otherwise this would require great resources to be achieved. Therefore, the purpose of the GAIN (goal action information network) environment is to support a network organization seeking to coordinate its actions and share knowledge using the Web technology. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses the main characteristics of network organizations, focusing on the issues related to knowledge sharing and collaboration. Section 3 presents the requirements for the efficient working of a network organization and introduces GAIN, a collaborative environment aimed at augmenting participants’ efforts towards the organization’s goals. In Section 4, the paper describes a case study carried out with a group of organizations organized as a network. In Section 5, we relate our work with other works found in the literature. Section 6 concludes the paper. 2. Network organizations The word network is present in people’s lives in diverse forms. Every day, we watch programs in TV networks; we pay our accounts in a banking network; we worry about the expansion of the network of drug dealers. Urban infrastructures such as water and electric power are called networks. Companies such as pharmacies and snack bars, which have branch offices, are considered networks. Computers that interchange information are connected through a network.

The etymology of the word network points to the Latin ‘‘retis’’, which indicates a type of mesh to capture small game animals, birds and fish. The idea of network is then originally related to capturing something. Thus, we can perceive a network as an instrument for information and knowledge capture. In the social context, a network can be defined as a set of actors connected by a set of ties. The actors can be persons, teams, organizations, etc. Ties connect pairs of actors and can be directed or undirected, and can be dichotomous (present or absent) or valued (measured on a scale). A set of ties of a given type constitutes a binary social relation, and each relation defines a different network, e.g., friendship network is distinct from advice network (Borgatti & Foster, 2003). The network paradigm has been a focus for research attention in the European and Scandinavian literature since the mid-1970s. More recently, a similar focus has emerged in American literature (Cravens et al., 1996). There is a whole range of definitions: some definitions emphasize the flexibility and the collaborative nature of work in network—‘‘A network is an organizational system capable of congregating individuals and institutions in a democratic and participative form, around common themes and/or objectives. Under a flexible and rhythmic structure, a network is established in horizontal relations, interconnected under a dynamic trend that takes on collaborative and participative work. The network is supported by the motivation and affinity of its members, featuring itself as a significant organizational resource, either for personal relationships or for social structure. In the practical terms, networks are communities, virtually or face-to-face constituted’’ (Chisholm, 1998). 2.1. Characteristics of network organizations Network organizations can be defined by structure, process, and purpose elements. Structurally, a network organization combines co-specialized assets under shared control. Procedurally, a network organization supports participants’ actions via their roles and positions within the network organization. A network, as an organization, implies in a common purpose, and thus the need for a sense of identity, so as to define the strategy and goals of purpose. Without a common purpose, participants cannot know whether actions are directed towards cooperative gains. These three design elements—co-specialized assets, joint control, and collective purpose—distinguish network organizations from centralized organizations, inflexible hierarchies, casual associations, haphazard societies, and mass markets (van Alstyne, 1997). In this work, the type of network in focus is defined as a set of people or organizations sharing an objective and committed to acting collaboratively in order to achieve this objective. They all have the same rights: information access; free speech; freedom of action; voluntary registration, participation and disconnection. The various charac-

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teristics of network organizations can be analyzed under the following aspects: Existence of a common objective: The existence of a focus is the networking starting point. People who decide to participate are willing to share common goals and values. It does not matter whether the objective is spreading a religious doctrine or fighting poverty—it is imperative that the objective be clearly defined, in order to attract new participants and to guide those already part of it, always reflecting what members search (Chisholm, 1998; Podolny & Page, 1998). People with common objectives undergo the same situations and face similar problems. Thus, there is a great potential for information exchange. If there is freedom for selfexpression, members can judge information that flows through the network, thereby allowing its adaptation to different contexts. Focus on the action: A group of people that meets to study or to discuss a subject, such as groups of interest or communities of practice (Stewart, 1998) cannot be considered a network. They do not really operate on the real world with the intention of modifying reality. It is not enough to share the same class of problems to form a network: it is necessary to be aware that, by coordinating actions, people will reach better results than through independent work. Adhesion, participation and disconnection: One of the network’s main success factors is having contented people inside the network. Possibly, the reason for this is the absence of explicit coordination and control of its members. People participate when and in the manner they wish. They simply identify themselves with the purpose and decide to dedicate time and effort to a collective project. There is no monetary exchange between the network and its members. Ideally, there should not be obstacles for the creation of new networks. Therefore, when people do not agree with the way things are being conducted, they can disengage from this network and create a new one. Isonomy and multi-leadership: A single characteristic of the network is isonomy, which distinguishes it from a hierarchy (van Alstyne, 1997). There is isonomy when all members are equal under the same set of policies and follow the same rules indistinctly. Isonomy is a prerequisite for power sharing. However, it does not hinder the rising of leaders; on the contrary, any member can alternate the role of leader, thus providing a chance for everybody to propose actions and to attract other members to help their implementation. Independent leaders can coordinate different tasks simultaneously. Therefore, new coordination instruments are necessary to prevent conflicts and action duplicity. Distribution of information and freedom of speech: Network members have work autonomy. However, since there is no centralized power that takes care of everything occurring in the network, there is a possibility

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for duplicity of efforts to happen: two members carrying out the same action the final results of which being the same as if only one of them had done it. The open distribution of information helps to prevent this: the information sharing generates a context on which actions are executed. Thus, it is necessary to create mechanisms to plan and follow information creation and distribution. Self-organization and collaboration: Due to the lack of a single leadership to coordinate actions, a feeling of unreliability and anxiety emerges among the members of the network (Kautz, Selman, & Shah, 1997). The network generates its own work principles. One of the critical standards for success is collaboration among members, which must be a work premise. Collaboration is not always spontaneous and easy to obtain when people do not know one another, and do not meet face-to-face frequently. Therefore, there should be mechanisms to encourage collaboration and interaction among network participants. Capacity to attract new members: One of the purposes of the network is to extend its action and ideas to a larger group of interlocutors: beneficiaries, partners, financiers, volunteers, and collaborators. Members’ departure is compensated by the arrival of new ones, ensuring survival throughout the long term. Moreover, this prevents the emergence of other networks with the same objective, a fact that could generate competition, as well as dividing forces. The characteristics that distinguish network organizations from centralized organizations are flexibility, joint control, and collective purpose. The main differential between networks and other non-hierarchical organizations lies in their goal: a network is moved toward action. As a by-product, people can deepen their knowledge on a particular subject, as occurs in the groups of interest, or still discuss solutions to problems, as in communities of practice. However, networks aim at gathering people for action. An intense learning dynamics is found inside the networks. The links produced within the network along time benefit from a learning dynamics that rests on a memory logic (Lundvall, 1992). The accumulated knowledge must be stored in such a way that should facilitate retrieving it in the future, thus preventing that new members repeat their predecessors’ errors (Prusak, 2001). The network support should provide forms both to disseminate knowledge among members and to help them retrieve knowledge easily when needed. Borgatti and Foster (2003) suggest that individuals need to have certain kinds of relationships (e.g., mutual accessibility, low partner-specific transaction costs) in order to utilize each other’s knowledge. According to the knowledge and capacity of working, the network acts as in Vygotsky’s proximal development zone (Vygotsky, 1978): participants can achieve much more through the aid of network members than through outside

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Table 1 Mapping characteristics to requirements Characteristics

Requirements

Common objectives/goals, unifying purposes

(1) Make the organization’s objective explicit and clear (2) Link task requirements to goals explicitly

Focus on the action

(3) Provide simple but powerful support to action execution (4) Support the model and workflow enactment

Adhesion, participation and disconnection Capability to attract new members

(5) Make participants’ roles and tasks explicit (6) Facilitate joining of new members and easy disconnection

Isonomy and multi-leadership

(7) Support independent and distributed coordination (8) Support decentralized actions

Distribution of information and freedom of speech

(9) Support multiple views and initiatives (10) Disseminate information among participants (11) Support action perception

Self-organization and collaboration

(12) Support multiple coordination and means to achieve integrative actions (13) Stimulate and support collaboration among participants

individuals. Net efficiency will depend on the capacity of each member to convey information at a valuable time, enrich already-existing information, or foster knowledge growth and capacity of analysis. Lastly, the efficiency of a network is based on its capacity to generate new branches in time and space. Therefore, CSCW and knowledge management stand for areas that have much to offer to networks in order to support and enrich such flows (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995). They provide basic infrastructure, which renders the participation, interaction between people and knowledge building possible. This paper proposes a collaborative environment, which should support operational reality aspects of a network. 2.2. Requirements for a network organization support The characteristics listed in the previous sub-section need to be mapped to a set of requirements, discussed with a group of potential users with priority having been assigned. An attempt to define the most important requirements is presented on Table 1. 3. GAIN-Goal action information network A collaborative environment was specified and developed, based on the characteristics, requirements and network operation dynamics described in Section 2, to address each one of these needs, especially when the network organization is geographically distributed. The GAIN-goal action information network—environment aims at strengthening both the existing connections among members of one network and also creating new associations among the members of other similar networks. GAIN is a configurable virtual environment, which allows a network to connect its members and other networks through Internet (Rezende, Santoro, & Borges, 2005). It provides the network with a site, a document management system, knowledge-sharing features and

awareness mechanisms. Some open-source content manager systems were analyzed, with Plone1 selected due to its flexibility so as to implement the system. Plone runs on top of Zope,2 a well-known open source application server written in the Python3 language. We describe how each of the requirements for establishing a network (in Table 1) is supported by GAIN and how the environment proposes knowledge dissemination among its members. Network goal statement should be the first information passed to the visitor: this being well-posted on the homepage can increase the capacity of attracting new members. If he or she has the same goal and desires to collaborate, this will not fail to occur for want of knowledge. Despite being simple, this item should not be disregarded, lest the network be disturbed by attracting people with other goals. The environment manager can allow users to register or create a formal process, demanding that the form be filled out to include the latter as members of the network. The goal information displaying and the connecting and disconnecting members’ process address requirements 1 and 6, depicted in Fig. 1. Requirements 2, 3, 4, 5 and 11 are related to performance of group tasks mediated by the environment. Functionally related to them are creation of work groups; sharing and co-authoring documents; control of information publication; a voting tool; surveys and news/events publishing. One of the most common ways for people to operate inside the network, organizing their actions, aiming at reaching a specific goal occurs through the creation of work groups (WG), an action that can be performed by any network member. There is intense information exchange, collaboration and decision-making in the work group. GAIN supports the operation of work groups

1 2 3

Plone: http://www.plone.org. Zope: http://www.zope.org. Python: http://www.python.org.

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Fig. 1. GAIN main interface.

through shared folders, wherein they can create documents available for any member of WG to read or change their content; additionally, each member can have his or her own private folder. A voting tool is also available, which assists the decision maker in situations in which consensus cannot be achieved. Therefore, when a network member wishes to start a new action, he can publish a piece of news, stimulating people to join in. Then he can create a work group, defining the action and relating it to the network objective (requirement 2); he can publish the documents related to this action (including photos), and all participants can make changes to documents; he can promote inquiries about a topic to obtain the other members’ opinion about something. Peo-

ple can also make comments about some published pieces of news (Fig. 2). The environment implements a workflow engine to support document publication. Publishing workflow mechanism is described in Fig. 3, where the possible states of a document are shown. Members and reviewer follow the actions related to these steps before the document is finally displayed in the environment. This function is the main differential provided by the GAIN in relation to general knowledge sharing environments. The GAIN environment reduces the number of user levels to a minimum, aiming at meeting the principle of isonomy (requirements 7 and 8). Thus, only a small number of roles is defined: member, manager and reviewer. The

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Fig. 2. News and comments about an action performed by a work group.

Fig. 3. Publishing workflow.

manager is responsible for administrative tasks, such as compacting the database. The reviewer’s role was created to avoid publishing repetitive content, which could foster information overload to members. Content of the type News or Event, which appears on the home page, should be authorized by the reviewer for publication. Note that the reviewer does not have the power to censor, just the coordination of the publication actions. The great majority of the network participants will perform a member role. Aiming at increasing information distribution speed and free speech within the network (requirements 9, 10, 12 and 13), each member owns his own work area, in which he or she can render pages, links, photos available, download files, news and events, among other types of content. Anything a member places in his work area falls under his sole responsibility, and does not depend on the reviewer’s approval for publication. However, it is not enough to pub-

lish information: feedback from other members is necessary. Therefore, there is a discussion forum attached to each published item that enables adding comments and notes specifically related to it (Fig. 4). GAIN’s goal is to encourage not only the information flow inside the network, but also the information flow among networks. As the networks are autonomous entities, one faces the risk of effort duplicity in case no mutual knowledge about each others’ actions is secured. Two mechanisms were created for this purpose: the multi-network search and multi-network visualization. The content of each environment instance is totally indexed. If someone performs a search, the results from his own network are shown, as well as the results from the other networks selected by the manager (Fig. 5). Note that the multi-network search does not depend on a selection by the user. All searches accomplished in the environment will always look for information in their own network and in the connected networks, allowing for a kind of ‘‘cross-pollination’’: a network influences the actions of the others by intense information exchange, thereby affecting their development. The search result is formatted as RSS,4 a XML vocabulary, and then easily read by the other sites. In addition to the RSS standard having been created for news syndication, it is useful when data must be transferred between sites.

4

RSS: http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/.

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Fig. 4. Discussion forum.

Fig. 5. Multi-network search.

The other mechanism, multi-network visualization, presents information from the other networks related to some topic from this network. For example, on the news page, the news from the network itself appears highlighted in the central position and the news from the other networks is presented around it. Akin the human eye, self-information is in the focal point, whereas the other information is in the peripheral vision. The news and other content types are transferred between sites using the RSS standard. As it uses the HTTP protocol, this can be cached and achieve high scalability, scaling well even with many networks. The multi-network search and multi-network visualization mechanisms deliver to the user more information

Table 2 Mapping requirements to system functions Requirements

System functions

(1) Make the organization’s objective explicit and clear

The description presented in the Web site should promote this requirement. Goals are divided into tasks that are linked to their process model. A simple workflow model and enactment is provided. As mentioned above. The model not only defines the roles but also make them visible to other participants. Awareness mechanisms about the task execution are provided. The coordination role can be split among different people promoting isonomy. The workflow model allows actions to be distributed while maintaining consistency with the model. The system supports the initiative to start an action by any authorized member. The Web environment associated with an awareness mechanism provides this functionality. As requirement #10 above. Multiple coordination is supported.

(2) (3) (4) (5)

Link task requirements to goals explicitly Provide simple but powerful support to action execution Support the model and enactment of workflows Make participants’ roles and tasks explicit

(6) Facilitate joining of new members and easy disconnection (7) Support independent and distributed coordination (8) Support decentralized actions (9) Support multiple views and initiatives (10) Disseminate information among participants (11) Support action perception (12) Support multiple coordination and means to achieve integrative actions (13) Stimulate and support collaboration among participants

The task workflow and the discussion forum are the main functions to support collaboration.

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than he or she requested, but that will allow for creating a context to influence the individual’s actions. This information delivered by default is essential so that members from each network know what is taking place in the related networks, thereby avoiding effort duplicity and allowing for the correct action classification. We observe coordination effects, even though there was no one performing the coordinator’s role. We name it passive coordination when we accomplish the results of coordination in a group without having someone explicitly or implicitly performing that role. In the GAIN environment, this effect is achieved through valuable information delivery, which although not requested by the users, does not overload them. Several tools are available, either synchronous or asynchronous, in order to stimulate collaboration among members: members and non-members of the network can use a discussion forum and chat room. There is also the possibility of a member inviting other members to write a document together, or even all the documents in a certain folder. Table 2 reviews the requirements described in Section 2 showing how the GAIN environment supports them. 4. A case study with GAIN We have evaluated our proposal by observing real network organizations operating at distance supported by the GAIN environment. The goal of this study was to raise views on the validity and feasibility of support for collaboration among organizations in network. The case study made it possible for one to analyze the networks’ characteristics described, as well as the behavior of networks connected to other networks. 4.1. Case study configuration and action description Four non-profit organizations were selected for the undertaking of a case study using GAIN. All the organizations involved had the same goal: acting in the region where they are physically located in order to reduce poverty and violence. Joining the organization is voluntary and members choose to carry a number of philanthropic tasks. One of the main characteristics of these nets, which differentiate them from the communities of practice, is the fact that their members join in collaborative actions to the benefit of the whole net objective. The organizations in the case study carry out actions such as charity lunches, arts and crafts bazaars or common utensil sales in order to collect funds for helping people. Four aspects were observed: the degree and quality of environment use by each organization; the occurrence of conflicting actions; the occurrence of duplicated actions; the occurrence of joint actions. For each organization, the environment was installed and configured; additionally, training was administered to their managers, who then acted as multipliers. The case study took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and spanned five months.

A member of one of the organizations, the ‘Nedvida’, was trained to perform as an environment manager and immediately started to introduce content to the other members. During those presentations, the environment was shown and a small number of participants had the chance to try it. Fifteen people, representing a total of seven organizations, were trained, but only four participated in the case study. Following the training period, they started to effectively use the environment in several ways. Organizations in networks are based on the actions performed collaboratively by their members. We can sum up the actions supported and stimulated within the GAIN as: charity events, lectures and family assistance. One of the main activities developed is the ‘‘charity lunch’’. The organization chair secures the venue, as well as most of the ingredients, tables and chairs through donations. Therefore, the event cost is zero, and all the proceeds from invitation sales become a profit to be applied in the activities to support poor people in the region. Generally, the lunches happen at two-month intervals. Because this type of event involves weeks of planning and demands the participation of many members, it is not possible to hold it at a greater frequency, although this would be a good source of income. Two lunches were held during a three-month period through the case study. Their frequency could increase because it was easier to plan and establish communication among the participants of the action through GAIN. If two events by different organizations are planned for the same period, all of them lose, because attendance is divided between both, thereby reducing the incomes of each. This often happened before GAIN, not being observed during the case study. During the case study, two organizations accomplished one event together, sharing the responsibility and the proceeds. Due to the success of the jointly-organized event, both organizations decided that their events will continue to be performed together. Those organizations promote weekly lectures; they used the environment to divulge them and store the transcription of those already presented. Other events that involve all the members in the State of Rio de Janeiro, such as social gatherings had their planning meetings also promoted through the environment, since their organizer was a participant in the case study. Another example of use was deciding on an old problem: guiding the visitors to the city on how to arrive at organizations as well as their schedules, including maps and clarifying doubts through commentaries placed in the environment on behalf of the visitors. A function very much used by the members of the nets was commentary, which works uniformly for all types of content, being simple to use. Since the author of the content is notified by email, the questions were always answered. In inquiries, commentaries allowed the visitors to go beyond the simple election of one of the available options. The sharing of folders and contents was used to distribute the responsibility for updating information. Four

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groups of users were created, with specific work areas. For example, the people of the administrative area, responsible for the writing of acts and the spreading of balance sheets, were responsible for the session ‘‘Administration’’, and allowed both to create new contents and to modify existing ones. All folders or type of content own a ‘‘sharing space’’, which allows selecting individual users or groups to access to the content. The support and social promotion service (SAPSE) is a work group in the network responsible for the assistance of families that alone cannot support themselves. At the same time, they teach the members of the family new skills and help them to search for jobs. Supervision is carried out monthly, until the family can go ahead by itself. Each new remark observed was written in the family’s record, which had previously been recorded only on paper. There is currently a forum in which a new discussion thread was created for each family, and each visit is recorded as a comment in the forum, thus replacing the paper record. To uphold families’ privacy, only the members belonging to the SAPSE work group have access to this forum. 4.2. Discussion of results The environment has proven to be adequate to support the operation of a network with distant members. Subjects have been queried in the forum, and the spaces for commentaries provided many instances of shared content. Decisions have been made with the resource inquiry. Each member had its own ‘‘subsite’’, in which he or she was able to promote own subjects of interest. Functionalities used

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only to motivate people to participate, as the photo album and inquiries, have broken the barrier for learning the environment. People’s curiosity in viewing their photos was the first contact with the environment on the part of some network members. We analyze the results in terms of some network characteristics that have been encouraged. The sharing of folders among the members, decentralizing their operation, has proven instrumental to making updates more agile, making content always available, stimulating its visitation. This led to the persistence of isonomy and also motivated different people to become members. The scheduling of conflicting events did not occur during the case study: this is due to multisite content, search and visualization resources. Members visualized the notices of their own organization, and also those of all others which prevented the scheduling of an event on the same day. In that case, we see that information was easily posted by individuals and distributed among the members of one organization and among organizations. The environment allowed actions and collaboration to be supported at a distance. An innovative use of the forum was observed: due to the ease in creating a new forum and restricting their access, the manager of one of the environments created a ‘‘forum’’ to record the visits to families attended. Each family was ‘‘placed’’ into a forum topic and the visits and attendance were launched as queries in the corresponding family topic. Concern with social aspects proved important: the forum was repurposed to keep the history of the assisted families, as shown in Fig. 6 (to preserve anonymity, personal information was hidden).

Fig. 6. The ‘‘new’’ usage for the forum.

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Environment implementation limitations had been perceived in the course of another action when two of the organizations decided to create a joint event, the ‘‘charity lunch’’. Despite offering the possibility of organizing information about the planning and execution of such event, tasks would have to be distributed and followed until their completion. At this moment, the first problem appeared: in which of two environments should this ‘‘common workstation’’ be published? Would it be useful to concentrate on only one of them, or to duplicate the content in two environments? The last option was chosen—the solution was to create, in each, a place to distribute information to the members of each team—which resulted in duplicity of information and work, a seemingly fact unsatisfactory to the organizations involved. While the case study was in progress, a census of the non-profitable organizations was carried out. Each organization received a four-page questionnaire to be filled out and returned. When analyzing the questionnaire, we realized that a considerable amount of the information requested, such as the number of network members, was already available in the environment. There are, just in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, over 900 organizations similar to the four mentioned in our case study. This shows the potential of the environment proposed. Another type of collaboration was the sharing of information among organizations, in addition to acting together. As previously explained, each organization could choose which other organizations would take part in the multi-network search and visualization. As just four organizations took part in the case study, each of them decided to connect with all the others, as in Fig. 7. This relationship established among organizations allows the network to be automatically mapped, establishing a series of analysis possibilities (Horn, Finholt, Birnholtz, Motwani, & Jayaraman, 2004). Looking at the hypothetical network in Fig. 8, it is possible to understand the concepts of ‘‘degrees’’, ‘‘betweenness’’ and ‘‘closeness’’ (Krebs, 2000). Degree specifies with how many other nodes a certain node is connected; according to this inquiry, node E would be the most privileged, with 5 connections. Common wisdom induces us to say that the more connections, the better; however, this is not always so. There are other more important characteristics, such as betweenness. Despite E having more direct connections, node F plays the role of bridge, without which the other nodes would be disconnected. It is a ‘‘single point of failure’’, which

A

B

C

D

Fig. 7. Connections between four networks.

I B

A E

F C

G

H

D J

Fig. 8. Hypothetical social network based on kite network (Krebs, 2000).

should be avoided. Nodes of this type play the role of information broker, and are indispensable for keeping the network unit. Another important characteristic is the concept of closeness, which indicates how near a node is to all the others. By this measure, nodes B and D are privileged: they do not have so many connections as E, likewise, but they secure access to other network nodes more quickly than any other node. It is recommendable not to depend on F for connection in case nodes G or H are important for the network. Other relationships should be encouraged, such as the one of B with G, so that they continue interacting with the rest of the network in case of F fails. 4.3. Searching and sharing knowledge in the network The multi-network search and multi-network visualization mechanisms were also tested by case study participants. First, the environment stimulates networks members to publish the news about their events and work in progress. We have understood that they were excited about the possibility of highlighting actions performed and being viewed by their peers in an easier and faster manner. Afterward, the automatic search for information and presentation in a well-designed fashion, within the GAIN, let people find information they might need as well as locate colleagues for collaborative dealings. These mechanisms started a process of combining and sharing that can culminate with generating products collectively, at the end of the organizational network main goal. Environment expertise could even be enhanced when, besides search and presentation, it delivers the information to the right people by identifying their roles and matching their intentions in the network. Besides information exchange among organizations, an increase of knowledge exchange inside each organization was also achieved. Frequently a great number of members could not take part in all meetings because they could not be physically present thereat and could not express their opinions either. Through the GAIN environment they were able to express their ideas, give opinions about the other

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members’ ideas and even recruit volunteers for activities proposed. When the members live in urban areas and, therefore, have access to the Internet, the environment is used intensely for communication among their own network members. When the members live in rural areas or have difficulty to access the Internet, there occurs face-toface interaction among network members, but the environment renders the communication and action coordination with the other networks possible. One member having access to the Internet is the sole condition for the individual’s organization to be connected to all other networks. 5. Related work There is a close relationship between the kind of network we are dealing with in our research and the social networks. Amrit, Hillegersberg, and Kumar (2004) state ‘‘social networks often represent groups of people and the connections among them’’. The strengths of social network analysis have resulted in increasing use for understanding a range of small-through-large group interactions. In general, social networks originated from a descriptive and analytic discipline, but there is a trend toward embedding social networks into systems with the goal of facilitating new or renewed collaboration. Lately, chances for communication and collaboration via computer networks have been massively increased in networked organizations. Social networks are as important as the official organizational structures for tasks such as local problem solving or creating collaborative groups (Ogata & Yano, 1999). The foundation for social networks is the creation of social and technical conditions for a community to emerge. Beyond usability issues, this type of design is mostly concerned with sociability issues: promoting interactivity among users in discourse communities (Fischer, 2003). Social networks are a more general grouping format: they do not have necessarily a goal to reach, but just connect people creating nodes for many kinds of interaction. We observe in literature that much attention has been given to the social networks: they have been studied and discussed in terms of their element organization and ways these elements work together. Some applications have been built to support them. For example, according to Boyd (2004), explicit social networking sites have existed for years (e.g., SixDegrees.com), but, more recently, different kinds of interest have resulted in the emergence of sites dedicated to creating communities and helping people capitalize on their social networks for jobs (Ryze.com, LinkedIn.com), dating (Friendster.com), recommendations and listings (Tribe.net). ter Hofte and Mulder (2004) cited the ‘‘netWORKing study’’, which is an ethnographic study about a number of working practices made by Nardi, Whittaker, and Schwarz (2002). They created the term intentional networks to define ‘‘the personal social networks that are built and maintained by people with considerable effort and that

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serve as a resource from which contacts can be selected and activated and grouped in live subnets at the time work is to be done, typically a for job or a project that runs from anywhere between several days to several months’’. In the first example, the network arrangement is built with the intention of facilitating uncommitted encounters, with a number of computing systems already implemented to support them. In those systems, people can easily be associated through their social relationships or, in other words, their ‘‘friends’’ in the real world. Regarding the second one, the so-called intentional networks, there is some work to be performed by the group, although there is no specific support for them. Furthermore, there is a concept called computer-supported social networks (Groth, 2003), which includes associations sustained through computer environments, such as, chat, news, and e-mail. Groth (2003) affirms that social networks, whether supported by relationships established through computer environments, or not, serve as a base for communities of practice. The use of social networks informally, where they grow by themselves, is a starting point for knowledge management, as akin to the fact that collaboration and supporting personal contacts in the use of social networks facilitates collaborative activities between people in the organization. Supporting social networks in an organization also supports a natural way of discovering things. According to Wellman et al. (1996), the computer-supported social networks have strong implications to the community, as the authors state ‘‘fostering situations that combine global connectivity, the fragmentation of solidarities, the de-emphasis of local organizations (in the neighborhood and workplace), and the increased importance of home bases’’. The authors analyze many kinds of computer-supported networked organizations for various purposes and concluded that on-line information flows spread out unpredictably through message forwarding, providing access to more people and new social circles, thus increasing the probability of finding someone who can solve problems. Ching, Holsapple, and Whinston (1996) also carried out an extensive review of Information Technology support for network organizations. At that time they recognized the need for new paradigms, but they referred mainly to separate organization networks, not individuals. Wang, Haake, Lillehagen, Karlsen, and Rubart (2001) reached a similar conclusion. From an organizational perspective, dispersed work groups require social and technical support (Wellman et al., 1996). Virtual communities have allowed people to switch quickly and frequently between groups of ties. All at once, their more individualistic behavior means the declining of solidarity coming from working in large groups; there is also no specific system to support this kind of organization at distance support (Wellman et al., 1996). We found in literature two kinds of systems to support virtual network: both are related to communities (the social networks and the communities of practice) and promoting

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meetings of similar interest people, sometimes related to solution of common problems, sometimes just for having a date, but never to collaborate in order to produce something. In our research, we are interested in a special type of network organization in which members join by personal interests just like in communities of practice, this concern, however not being professional. Instead they wish to act collectively for a cause they believe in. Therefore, collaboration and knowledge sharing are essential. Support is needed when these groups work at a distance and GAIN was designed for that. Gra¨ther and Prinz (2001) proposed an environment called the social Web cockpit aimed at supporting virtual meetings in the Web. Knowledge sharing is the main support provided to virtual communities. Different from our environment, however, the ‘‘cockpit’’ is oriented to communities that make use of Web sites to share knowledge. In GAIN, the main goal is the support for action coordination; knowledge sharing is a consequence, not the main goal. On the other hand, it is true that some functions are equivalent in both environments. 6. Conclusions and future work Computational support to geographically distributed networks is performed mainly by means of Web sites and discussion lists through e-mail, which only provides information about the work and does not use its potential to stimulate communication and collaboration. In this paper, a collaborative environment is presented, aiming at providing networks with interaction, knowledge sharing and action coordination support. The success of network organizations depends strongly on the degree of contribution reached in the accomplishment of their actions. It is possible to observe by means of the case study, not only that the contribution was stimulated in the internal network level, but also in a similar network group. The groupware tool helps in action coordination, preserving isonomy and multi-leadership within the network members. Most network organizations depend heavily on voluntary work and do not have the funds to acquire and manage a commercial tool. Besides, they require flexibility and a different way of working not always present in commercial tools aimed at hierarchical organizations. The GAIN environment is provided free of charge to any social organization. Its design is suitable to distributed and autonomous coordination and actions, a common requirement in network organizations. As for future works, we intend to extend the use of the GAIN environment to other organizations and observe the effect throughout a longer stated period in order to confirm the indications secured in our first experience. Therefore, plans exist to use the environment in 900 organizations similar to that of the present case study in Rio de Janeiro. Moreover, the automatic mapping of the social net, the generating and application of multi-network reports, which

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