A Recommender System to Share Knowledge in Software Organizations

Knowledge management is, at present, a topic of special interest since knowledge has become organizations’ most valuable asset. Suitable knowledge management therefore improves employees’ learning and encourages them to share information. A technique which helps organizations to attain the goal of sharing knowledge is that of Communities of Practice (CoP), which can be defined as groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who extend their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis. A further important aspect of CoP is that of membership feeling. Developing community membership implies a clear role, responsibility and the development of trust. Moreover, many authors consider that trust facilitates problem solving by encouraging information exchange and the influence of team members, in the absorption of knowledge, in formulating a sense of self-identity and as the basis of political soundness [3]. Trust has a silent presence in all social interaction [4].
However, the development of trust in a virtual setting may be more difficult than in co-located meetings [5]. At present, CoP are frequently distributed and are supported by technology. This is, in some respects, advantageous as it facilitates communication between people who work or live in different places. However, distribution also makes face-to-face communication more difficult. Nevertheless, this kind of communication is important as it is arguably the “surest way to establish and nurture the human relationships which are grounded in social bonding and are symbolic expressions of commitment” [6]. Because trust is important in all virtual relationships [7], we propose a multi-agent recommender system, based on the trust concept, whose goal is to help software organization teams to take advantage of the knowledge contained within this knowledge recommender system.