Communityspace: Toward flexible support for voluntary knowledge communities

Abstract

We describe CommunitySpace, a component of a project to support voluntary, electronic communities of practice. We detail some of our design decisions, emphasizing issues of flexibility, diversity, and democracy. These design decisions will have impact upon the user interface to CommunitySpace, but they have much more immediate impact upon the architecture, representation, and dynamics of usage of the system. Our work is in the requirements and design phase, and we are interested in the comments of our peers on our evolving ideas.