The purpose of this paper is to present a framework for cultivating virtual communities of practice in distributed environments. The framework is based on the integration of knowledge artifacts and wearable technologies.
The proposed knowledge artifact is based on the correlation between conceptual and computational tools for the representation of different kinds of knowledge.
In this way, it is possible to make deeper the collaboration between knowledge seekers and contributors within the community, given that seekers and contributors share, at least in part, design choices at the knowledge modeling level.
A practical application of the framework has been described, to show its originality with respect to traditional knowledge management systems. In particular, it has been demonstrated how lurking phenomenon inside communities of practice can be significantly reduced. To this aim, opportune indexes have been defined from existing ones in literature.
