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This paper concerns the relationship between agents or multi-agent systems and distributed communities of practice. It presents a review of a number of agent and multiagent applications with features that could contribute to supporting distributed communities of practice. The association is promising because of features like autonomy, pro-activity, flexibility or ability to integrate systems that characterize agents and multi-agent systems. Furthermore, such an association is a step towards building mixed communities of humans and artificial agents. To understand how agents and multi-agent systems could answer some of the needs of distributed communities of practice, we organize the analyzed applications into five different categories defined by considering the main activities of a community, namely: Individual Participation, Synchronous Interactions, Asynchronous Interactions, Publishing and Community Cultivation. Such a classification helps us identify the relevant features of the current technology and determine some that should be further developed, e.g. to support community coordination or gather information related to virtual communities. For each application we selected, we present its main approach and point out its potential interest.

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Symbiotic computing leads to a proliferation of computing devices that in turn allow linking people, favouring the development of Communities of Practice (CoPs). The notion of Communities of Practice is newer than the social organization it describes, but the emergence of technologies based on the Internet like emails, forums, blogs, wikis, conference calls, video-conference facilitated the creation of a new kind of CoP: the distributed CoP. Distributed CoPs are CoPs whose members being dispersed geographically have to rely strongly on technological means to interact. Distributed CoPs face new issues due to the distance among members, the size of the community and the cultural differences. In this context, coordinating distributed CoPs is even more challenging than coordinating their collocated counterparts.Things that happen rather spontaneously in a collocated community must be instigated in a distributed one, overloading the coordination of distributed CoPs. The increasing role of the coordination should be supported by an adequate set of coordination tools. In this paper we present a tool that aims at supporting the coordination of distributed CoPs. This tool lets the coordination follow the evolution of the community. It analyzes the exchanges among members and shows this information in a graphical format in order to help the coordination to follow the evolution of the participation and the domain of the community.

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