Knowledge Sharing Community in P2P Network and its Application Features: A Study of Motivation Perspective

How to effectively share knowledge within organizations has been given much more attention in practice as well as in research. However, most of current approaches are based on the centralized network structure, e.g. a central knowledge repository, which has been considered inappropriate and ineffective to facilitate the process of knowledge sharing. On the contrary, in this study, we propose the idea of virtual knowledge sharing community that is based on the decentralized P2P technology. In the community, each member plays equal role of knowledge producing, receiving and coordinating. We believe that the decentralized P2P has many distinct advantages in knowledge sharing. Moreover, referring to relevant psychological studies on human motivation, four application features for the virtual knowledge sharing community are further proposed. After being applied, each of the features is believed to have capability of motivating the members of community to share knowledge with each other.

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