Designing support to participation in communities of practice through recommender systems

Communities of practice have been adopted by many organizations to promote collaborative learning and sharing of knowledge. Although various applications have been built to support this learning process, they fail to deal with one of the main problem: keeping users interacting and exchanging relevant information. We claim that the supporting system should provide the necessary stimulus for the community members to collaborate. Therefore, we claim the recommendations as a type of loyalty mechanism. The design of the collaborative environment TeamWorks is presented, illustrating our proposal.