European Journal of ePractice

The arrival of the 2.0 paradigm seems to have a strong influence on all activities related to knowledge sharing. Good practice exchange is one of these activities. In Web 2.0 what we find is collective creativity oriented not only to new forms of content creation and access, but also to the explicit building and fostering of new social forms of collaboration.

Taken in the broadest sense, this creativity in social interaction spans from infrastructures (Grid Computing for example) to actual people organized in communities. These communities are based on personal contribution and, of course, collaborative creation of content and knowledge.

We frame the discussion about the impact of 2.0 on good practice exchange by setting it in the general framework of knowledge exchange in communities of practice. We have proposed a view of good practice exchange that is based on both sociological exchange theory and the findings of research in complex organization design. Both take as a departing point the difficulties that arise in creating communities of individuals that progress if they cooperate. A simple model that integrates social, knowledge and technological considerations was used to assess the main characteristics of several ongoing initiatives. We used its dimensions as a guide for the evaluation and clustering of projects and services. They were mainly in the area of practice exchange in eGovernment but also in other, more general, areas.

In this paper we summarize our findings, explore three significant initiatives and try to identify future trends in the interconnection of good practice exchange and 2.0 potentialities.