Community knowledge in an emerging online professional community: the case of Sigchi.dk

This paper focuses on community knowledge in an emerging online professional community. Members of a Danish human–computer interaction community, 120 usability professionals, designers and researchers, described in an online survey their interest in theory and familiarity with methods. The results are reported in detail, and show a unanimous interest in theory, with a variety of reasons behind. Furthermore, the results indicate that the community's body of theoretical knowledge is divided into clear-cut faculties, with only general usability and human–computer interaction concepts available for communication and cooperation. This implies that a view of the Danish usability professionals as sharing a special discipline is wrong, and that attempts to create a special common language or general theoretical framework (e.g. Kuutti and Bannon, 1991) will be unfruitful. Rather, an online professional community should be interpreted as a community of interest (Fischer, 2001), and we should use tools developed for these kinds of communities as support tools. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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