Suitable Awareness Mechanism for Sharing Knowledge

Communities of Practice are knowledge-intensive communities, which basically accumulate and share knowledge around a common topic of interest. As knowledge sharing is the best added value that people find in meet communities of practice, any technological approach for supporting knowledgeintensive communities must guarantee it. This paper seeks to show that any approach for supporting a collaborative community memory system (a traditional technological solution for supporting knowledge sharing) must take into account awareness feature, since awareness plays essential role at the moment of sharing knowledge. Awareness is not only a means for understanding what is going on in the shared knowledge workspace, but also it is clue to maintain the community “in action”, so sharing knowledge successfully. Awareness becomes in the source of emergent knowledge.