E-Cocreation of Knowledge through Informal Communications

It is pointed out that the 21st century is an era of knowledge creation where productivity of knowledge is more important than the productivity of things. Therefore, improvement of the productivity of knowledge is an urgent demand from public organizations i.e., industry, academia and government as well as personal individuals. As a method to achieve it, knowledge management systems have recently been studied and developed. However, there have been few cases that could successfully improve the productivity of knowledge; many systems have been installed but not used. One of the principal problems of the ordinary attempts is, I think, the unbalanced way for sharing the knowledge. For example, experts are required to voluntarily provide their professional knowledge to create and to maintain a knowledge-base with many efforts so that novices as free riders can readily exploit the knowledge-base without any efforts. In order to solve and/or to avoid this problem, I focused on informal communications by chance as places for sharing knowledge and my laboratory has been constructed various e-cocreation systems to support sharing and creating knowledge in the informal communications. This chapter introduces some of the research efforts conducted in the author’s laboratory.