Collaborative Information Environments
for Innovative Communities of Practice
Gerry Stahl
Center for LifeLong Learning and Design
University of Colorado at Boulder, USA
In the information age, lifelong learning and collaboration are essential aspects of most innovative work. Fortunately, the computer technology which drives the information explosion also has the potential to help individuals and teams to learn much of what they need to know on demand. In particular, computer-based systems on the Internet can be designed to capture knowledge as it is generated within a community of practice and to deliver relevant knowledge when it is useful. Computer-based design environments for skilled domain workers have recently graduated from research prototypes to commercial products, supporting the learning of individual designers. Such systems do not, however, adequately support the collaborative nature of work or the evolution of knowledge within communities of practice. If innovation is to be supported within collaborative efforts, these domain-oriented design environments must be extended to become collaborative information environments, capable of providing effective community memories for managing information and learning within constantly evolving collaborative contexts.
Computer Support for Individual Innovation
The Need for LifeLong Learning for Innovation
The creation of innovative artifacts in our complex world–with its refined division of labor and its flood of information–requires continual learning. Learning can no longer be conceived of as an activity confined to the classroom and to an individual’s early years. Learning must continue while one is a worker, a citizen and an engaged adult for several reasons:
 | Innovative tasks are ill-defined; their solution involves the learning of information that could not have been predicted. |
| There is too much knowledge, even within specific subject areas, for anyone to master it all in advance or on one‘s own. |
| The knowledge in many domains evolves rapidly and often depends upon the context of one’s task situation, including one‘s support community. |
| Frequently, the most important information has to do with a work group’s own structure and history, its standard practices and roles, the details and design rationale of its local accomplishments. |
| People’s careers and self-directed interests require various new forms of learning at different stages as their roles in communities change. |
| Learning—especially collaborative learning—has become a new form of labor, an integral component of work and organizations. |
The contemporary need to extend the learning process from schooling into organizational and community realms is known as lifelong learning. Section 1 of this paper illustrates how computer support for lifelong learning has already been developed for individuals such as designers. It argues, however, that systems that deliver domain knowledge to individuals when it is relevant to their task are not sufficient for supporting innovative work within collaborative communities. Section 2 sketches a theory of how software productivity environments for design work by individuals can be extended to support lifelong learning in communities of practice. Section 3 provides a suggestive scenario of such a system being used by a community of computer network managers. Finally, Section 4 touches on a set of critical CSCW issues concerning the design of such collaborative information environments.
Domain-Oriented Design Environments
Many innovative work tasks can be conceived of as design processes: elaborating a new idea, planning a presentation, balancing conflicting proposals or writing a visionary report. While designing can proceed on an intuitive level based on tacit expertise, it periodically encounters breakdowns in understanding where explicit reflection on new knowledge may be needed [Schoen 83]. Thereby, designing entails learning.
For the past decade, researchers at the University of Colorado have explored the creation of computer-based design environments to support workers as designers. These systems are domain-oriented: they incorporate knowledge specific to the work domain. They are able to recognize when a breakdown in understanding has occurred and can respond to it with appropriate information [Fischer 89].
To go beyond the power of pencil-and-paper representations, software systems for lifelong learning must "understand" something of the tasks they are supporting. This is accomplished by building into the system knowledge of the domain, including design objects and design rationale. A design environment provides a computational workspace within which a designer can construct and represent the artifact being constructed. Unlike a CAD system, in which the software only stores positions of lines, a design environment maintains a representation of objects that are meaningful in the domain. For instance, an environment for local-area network (LAN) design (our primary example in this paper) allows a designer to construct a network design by arranging items from a palette representing workstations, servers, routers, cables and other devices from the LAN domain.
A design environment can contain domain knowledge about constraints, rules of thumb and design rationale. It uses this information to respond to a current design state with active advice. Our systems used a mechanism we call critiquing [Fischer et al. 93a]. The system maintains a representation of the semantics of the design situation: usually the two-dimensional location of palette items representing design components. Critic rules are applied to the design representation. When a rule "fires," it posts a message alerting the designer that a problem might exist. The message includes links to information such as design rationale associated with the critic rule.
For example, a LAN design environment might notice that the length of a cable in a design exceeds the specifications for that type of cable, that a router is needed to connect two subnets or that two connected devices are incompatible. At this point, the system could signal a possible design breakdown and provide domain knowledge relevant to the cited problem. The evaluation of the situation and the choice of action is up to the human designer, but now the designer has been given access to information relevant to making a decision [Fischer et al. 91].
Many of the ideas in our domain-oriented design environments are now appearing in commercial products, independently of our efforts. In particular, there are environments for designing LANs. As an example, consider NetSuite, a highly rated system that illustrates current best practices in LAN design support. This is a high-functionality system for skilled domain professionals who are willing to learn to use its rich set of capabilities (see Figure 1). NetSuite contains a wealth of domain knowledge. Its palette of devices that can be placed in the construction area numbers over 5,000, with more downloadable from the vendor every month. Each device has associated parameters defining its characteristics, limitations and compatibilities¾domain knowledge used by the critics that validate designs.
Figure 1. Two views of NetSuite. In the left view, the system has noted that a cable length specification for a FDDI network has been exceeded in the design and the system has delivered information about the specification and affected devices. In the right view, parts of the network viewed in physical and logical representations are connected.
In NetSuite, one designs a LAN from scratch, placing devices and cables from the palette. As the design progresses, the system validates it, critiquing it according to rules and parameters stored in its domain knowledge. The designer is informed about relevant issues in a number of ways: lists of devices to substitute into a design are restricted by the system to compatible choices, limited design rationale is displayed with the option of linking to further details and technical terms are defined with hypertext links. In addition to the construction area there are LAN tools, such as an automated IP address generator and utilities for reporting on physically existing LAN configurations. When a design is completed, a bill-of-materials can be printed out and an HTML page can be produced for display on the Internet. NetSuite is a knowledgeable, well constructed system to support an individual LAN designer.
Based on our understanding of organizational learning and our investigation of LAN design communities, we believe that in a domain like LAN management no closed system will suffice. The domain knowledge required to go beyond the functionality of NetSuite is too open-ended, too constantly changing and too dependent upon local circumstances. The next generation of commercial design environments will have to support extensibility by end-users and collaboration within communities of practice. While a system like NetSuite has its place in helping to design complex networks from scratch, most work of LAN managers involves extending existing networks, debugging breakdowns in service and planning for future technologies.
Many LAN management organizations rely on home-grown information systems because they believe that critical parts of their local information are unique. A community of practice has its own ways of doing things. Generally, these local practices are understood tacitly and are propagated through apprenticeship [Lave & Wenger 91]. This causes problems when the old-timer who set things up is gone and when a newcomer does not know who to ask or even what to ask. A community memory is needed that captures local knowledge when it is generated (e.g., when a device is configured) and delivers knowledge when needed (when there is a problem with that device) without being explicitly queried.
The burden of entering all this information in the system must be distributed among the people doing the work and must be supported computationally to minimize the effort required. This means that the software environment must be thoroughly interactive so that users can easily enter data and comments. The information base should be seeded with basic domain knowledge so that users do not have to enter everything and so that the system is useful from the start. As the information space grows, there should be ways for people to restructure it so that its organization and functionality keep pace with its evolving contents and uses [Fischer et al. 96]. Design environments must be extended to support communities of practice, not just isolated designers.
Supporting Communities of Practice
All work within a division of labor is social [Marx 1867]. The job that one person performs is also performed similarly by others and relies upon vast social networks. That is, work is defined by social practices that are propagated through socialization, apprenticeship, training, schooling, and culture [Giddens 84; Bourdieu 72], as well as by explicit standards. Often, work is performed by cooperating teams that form communities of practice within or across organizations [Brown & Duguid 91].
For instance, computer network managers at our university work in concert. They need to share information about what they have done and how it is done with other team members and with other LAN managers elsewhere. For such a community, information about their own situation may be even more important than generic domain knowledge [Orr 90]. Support for LAN managers must provide memory about how individual local devices have been configured as well as offer domain knowledge about standards, protocols and compatibilities.
Communities of practice can be co-located within an organization (e.g., at our university) or across a discipline (e.g., all directors of university networks). Before the World Wide Web existed, most computer support for communities of practice targeted individuals with desktop applications. The knowledge in the systems was mostly static domain knowledge. With intranets and dynamic web sites, it is now possible to support distributed communities and also to maintain interactive and evolving information about local circumstances and group history.
Digital Memories for Communities of Practice
Human and social evolution can be viewed as the successive development of increasingly effective forms of memory for learning, storing and sharing knowledge. Biological evolution gave us episodic, mimetic and mythical memory; then cultural evolution provided oral and written¾external and shared¾memory; finally modern technological evolution generates digital (computer-based) and global (Internet-based) memories [Donald 91; Norman 93]. At each stage, the development of hardware capabilities must be followed by the adoption of appropriate skills and practices before the potential of the new information technology can be realized.
Figure 2. Cycles of design, computer support and organizational learning.
External memories, incorporating symbolic representations, facilitated the growth of complex societies and sophisticated scientific understandings. Their effectiveness relied upon the spread of literacy and industrialization. Similarly, while the proliferation of networked computers ushers in the possibility of capturing new knowledge as it is produced within work groups and delivering relevant information on demand, the achievement of this potential requires the careful design of information systems, software interfaces and work practices. New computer-based organizational memories must be matched with new social structures that produce and reproduce patterns of organizational learning.
The Process of Organizational Learning
The ability of designers to proceed based on their tacit existing expertise [Polanyi 62] periodically breaks down and they have to rebuild their understanding of the situation through explicit reflection [Schoen 83]. This reflective stage can be helped if they have good community support or effective computer support to bring relevant new information to bear on their problem. When they have comprehended the problem and incorporated the new understanding in their personal memories, we say they have learned. The process of design typically follows this cycle of breakdown and reinterpretation (see Figure 2, cycle on left) [Stahl 93a].
When design tasks take place in a collaborative context, the reflection results in articulation of solutions in language or in other symbolic representations. The articulated new knowledge can be shared within the community of practice. Such knowledge, learned by the community, can be used in future situations to help a member overcome a breakdown in understanding. This cycle of collaboration is called organizational learning (see Figure 2, upper cycle). The personal reflection and collaborative articulation of shared perspectives makes innovation possible [Boland et al. 95; Tomasello et al. 93].
Organizational learning can be supported by computer-based systems of organizational memory if the articulated knowledge is captured in a digital symbolic representation. The information must be stored and organized in a format that facilitates its subsequent identification and retrieval. In order to provide computer support, the software must be able to recognize breakdown situations when particular items of stored information might be useful to human reflection (see Figure 2, lower cycle) [Stahl 93b].
Extending the Design Environment Approach
The key to active computer support that goes significantly beyond printed external memories is to have the system deliver the right information at the right time in the right way [Fischer et al. 93b]. Somehow, the software must be able to analyze the state of the work being undertaken, identify likely breakdowns, locate relevant information and deliver that information in a timely manner.
Systems like NetSuite and our older prototypes used critics based on domain knowledge to deliver information relevant to the current state of a design artifact being constructed in the design environment work space (see Figure 3, left).
Figure 3. Generalization of the domain-oriented design environment architecture (left) to a collaborative inforamtion environment (right).
One can generalize from the critiquing approach of these domain-oriented design environments to arrive at an overall architecture for organizational memories. It is still necessary to maintain some representation of the task as a basis for the software to take action. This is most naturally accomplished if work is done within the software environment. For instance, if communication about designs takes place within the system where the design is constructed, then annotations and email messages can be linked directly to the design elements they discuss. This reduces problems of deixis (comments referring to "that" object "over there"). It also allows related items to be linked together automatically. In a rich information space there may be many relationships of interest between new work artifacts and items in the organizational memory. For instance, when a LAN manager debugs a network, links between network diagrams, topology designs, LAN diary entries, device tables and an interactive glossary of local terminology can be browsed to discover relevant information.
The general problem is to define analysis mechanisms that can bridge from the task representation to relevant community memory information items to support learning on demand (see Figure 3, right).
To take a very different example, suppose you are writing a paper within a software environment that includes a digital library of papers written by you and your colleagues. Then an analysis mechanism to support your learning might compare sentences or paragraphs in your draft (which functions as a task representation) to text from other papers and from email discussions (the community memory) to find excerpts of potential interest to deliver for your learning. We use latent semantic analysis [Landauer & Dumais 97] to mine our email repository [Lindstaedt 97] and are exploring similar uses of this mechanism to link task representations to textual information to support organizational learning. Other retrieval mechanisms might be appropriate for mining catalogs of software agents or components, design elements and other sorts of organizational memories.
Integrative Systems for Community Memory
Effective community memory relies on integration. Tools for representing design artifacts and other work tasks must be related to rich repositories of information that can be brought to bear when needed. Communication about artifacts under development should be embedded in the artifact so they retain their context of significance and their association with each other. Finally, members of the community of practice must be integrated with each other in ways that allow something one member learned in the past to be delivered to other members when they need it in the future. One model for such integration¾on an individual level¾is the human brain, which stores a wealth of memories over a lifetime of experience, thought and learning in a highly inter-related associative network that permits effective recall based on relevance.
A traditional way to integrate information in a computer system is with a relational database. This allows associations to be established among arbitrary data. It also provides mechanisms like SQL queries to retrieve information based on specifications in a rather comprehensive language. Integrating all the information of a design environment in a unified database makes it possible to build bridges from the current task representation to any other information. Of course, object-oriented or hybrid databases and distributed systems that integrate data on multiple computers can provide the same advantages. Nor does an underlying query language like SQL have to be exposed to users; front-end interfaces can be much more graphical and domain-oriented.
Communities must also be integrated. The Internet provides a convenient technology for integrating the members of a community of practice, even if they are physically dispersed or do not share a homogeneous computer platform. In particular, intranets are web sites designed for communication within a specific community rather than world-wide. WebNet, for instance, is an intranet that we prototyped for LAN management communities. It includes a variety of communication media as well as community memory repositories and collaborative productivity tools (see Figure 4, left frame).
Figure 4. The WebNet LAN design and simulation workspace (upper-right frame) and information delivered by a critic (lower-right frame). Note table of contents to the web site (left frame).
Dynamic web pages can be interactive in the sense that they accept user inputs through selection buttons and text entry forms. Unlike most forms on the Internet that only provide information (like product orders, customer preferences or user demographics) to the webmaster, intranet feedback may be made immediately available to the user community that generated it. For instance, the following scenario includes an interactive glossary. When someone modifies a glossary definition the new definition is displayed to anyone looking at the glossary. Community members can readily comment on the definitions or change them. The history of the changes and comments made by the community is shared by the group. In this way, intranet technology can be used to build design environments that are collaborative information environments in which community members deposit knowledge as they acquire it so that other members can learn when they need to or want to and can communicate about it. Let us imagine how a system like WebNet might be used in a concrete scenario.
Scenario of a Collaborative Information Environment in Use
Critiquing and Information Delivery
Kay is a graduate student who works part-time to maintain her department’s LAN. The department has a budget to extend its network and has asked Kay to come up with a design. Kay brings up WebNet in her web browser at http://GerryStahl.net/WebNet/webnet.htm. She opens up the design of the current LAN and starts to add three new computers. Noticing that there is no icon for an Iris graphics workstation in her palette, Kay goes to the Simulation Repository web page and locates an object that someone else has created with the behavior of an Iris station. She adds this to her palette and to her design.
When Kay runs the LAN simulation, she is informed that a router is needed at the intersection of two subnets (see Figure 4, upper right). WebNet displays some basic information about routers and suggests several web bookmarks with details from vendors. It also points to several email messages from Kay’s colleagues that discuss router issues.
Kay adds a router and saves her new design in the catalog. Then she sends an email message to her co-workers in her department telling them to take a look at the new design in WebNet’s catalog. She also asks Jay, her mentor at Network Services, to check her work.
Jay studies Kay’s design in his web browser. He realizes that the Iris computer that Kay has added is powerful enough to perform the routing function itself. He knows that the simulation needs to be enhanced in order to make this option obvious to novices like Kay. So he looks at the simulation's program for the behavior of a server and adapts it to modify the behavior of the Iris object in the simulation. Then he redefines the router critic rule in the simulation. He also sends Kay an email describing the advantages of doing the routing in software on the Iris; this email may be delivered to people in situations like Kay’s in the future.
It is now two years later. Kay has graduated and been replaced by Bea. The subnet that Kay had added crashed last night due to print queue problems. Bea uses the LAN Management Info component of WebNet to trace back through a series of email trouble reports and entries in LAN diaries. After successfully debugging the problem using the community memory stored in WebNet, Bea documents the solution by making an entry in the technical glossary as well as noting detailed changes in the LAN diary.
The glossary makes definitions of technical terms and local terminology broadly available throughout WebNet. Other informational items link to the glossary and users can browse it directly. In keeping with WebNet’s interactive philosophy, glossary items can be annotated by users at any time. Definitions can be modified; a history of modifications is displayed upon request so that one can readily review differences.
In this scenario, Kay, Jay and Bea have used WebNet as a design, communication and memory system to support both their immediate tasks and the future work of their community.
Vision of Support for Innovative Communities
A community memory should be a collaborative information environment. Technical domains are too complex, fast changing and locally variable to expect a vendor of design environments like NetSuite to maintain rich repositories of domain knowledge. Local information is even harder than generic domain information for outside knowledge engineers to compile, being largely tacit expertise of community old-timers. So it is up to community members to maintain information collaboratively in a distributed fashion.
But busy people cannot be burdened with massive data entry tasks whose payoff seems remote. In our current research, we are exploring the following approaches to this problem:
| Allow people to build knowledge by commenting naturally on information as they encounter it in their regular work. All information (like glossary definitions) should be interactive, allowing for immediate annotation and revision (subject, of course, to security, privacy and authority issues). |
| Embed communication about artifacts within the same system as work on the artifact. Then the messages can be archived and associated with the artifact automatically. |
| Allow community members to link and reorganize information in order to build and update useful structuring of the information space. Support these efforts with automation where possible. |
| Help community members to personalize information delivery with adaptable features. Enhance this with automatic adaptation of the system to a user's preferences and needs. |
A collaborative information environment should be a high-functionality software environment in which people work, communicate and learn collaboratively:
| It should incorporate tools for engaging in the work practices of the group. |
| It should support multiple modes of communication, such as Internet chat, email, threaded discussions, ubiquitous annotation. |
| It should deliver the right information at the right time in the right way to support lifelong learning. |
In conclusion, emerging intranet technology provides the technological basis for effective organizational memories for learning by communities of practice. However, features, techniques and practices to realize this potential are just beginning to be investigated. While some of our early ideas for domain-oriented design environments have matured into current best practices, there are still many open research issues surrounding how to realize the potential of collaborative information environments for innovation within specific communities of practice.
This research was a collabortion of the author with Gerhard Fischer and Jonathan Ostwald. We would like to thank the other members of the Center for LifeLong Learning and Design, particularly the Organizational Memory group, including Jay Smith, Scott Berkebile, Sam Stoller, Jim Masson and Tim Ohara who worked on the WebNet system. Our knowledge of LAN design benefited from our domain investigators John Rieman and Ken Anderson and local informants Kyle Kucson and Evi Nemeth. The work reported here was supported in part by grants from ARPA and NSF. NetSuite Advanced Professional Design is a trademark of NetSuite.
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