TeamWorks: supporting and stimulating participation in communities of practice

The communities of practice have been one of the ways adopted by organizations to promote the sharing of knowledge, the cooperative learning and consequently the improvement of working processes. However, one of its greatest problems is how to keep users interacting and exchanging relevant information to the whole community. Loyalty mechanisms used in marketing are proposed as a solution for this problem, aiming to stimulate the active participation of the members. A cooperative work environment, named TeamWorks is presented, illustrating the loyalty mechanism concerning documents recommendation.