A Tool to Study the Evolution of the Domain of a Distributed Community of Practice

Abstract

Virtual communities and distributed communities of practice leave traces of their activities that are a valuable source of research material. At the same time, studying this kind of community requires new methods, techniques and tools. In this chapter, we present the Community Agent: a tool to follow the evolution of the domain of a distributed Community of Practice. Such a tool aims at obtaining and presenting graphically some indicators to study the evolution of the domain of a Community of Practice and the participation of its members. We present the implementation of the Community Agent, the results obtained in the preliminary tests and an example of how the agent could be used to study distributed communities.