10 The GRIFFIN Collaborative Virtual Community for Architectural Knowledge Management

Modern software architecting increasingly often takes place in geographically distributed contexts involving teams of professionals and customers with different backgrounds and roles. So far, attention and effort have been mainly dedicated to individuals sharing already formalized knowledge and less to social, informal collaboration. Furthermore, in Web 2.0 contexts, little to no attention has been given to practitioners carrying out complex, collaborative, and knowledge-intensive tasks in organizational contexts. This chapter shows how we can effectively support the combination of formal and informal collaboration and build a Virtual Community for architectural knowledge sharing. We present a set of collaboration scenarios that define a conceptual model for such a Virtual Community. A solution in this area would realize the expectations of companies involved in IT and working in distributed settings to effectively exploit their expertise, and turn their professional knowledge into a global IT portfolio.