Leadership in Team Based Knowledge Management - An Autopoietic Information System's Perspective

In this paper we show how team work between participants can be facilitated through the use of principles from autopoietic theory and modern WEB2.0 technologies like social networks, forums, semantic wiki systems, podcasting as well as social tagging in order to provide a suitable environment for knowledge management. We argue that leadership is an important factor for autopoiesis emergence as well as project success. Results form an experiment conducted on 160 students show that teams that were able to find a leader during the first week of collaboration were successfull while teams who didn't had problems in establishing creative collaboration. In the end we argue that by providing facilities for a dynamic leadership role one indirectly can facilitate the emergence os autopoiesis in such an environment. Keywords: autopoiesis, information system, social network, knowledge management, fishnet, WEB2.0