Perspectives on Knowledge Sharing System for Special Interest Group (SIG): Culture, Power Issues and User Interface

Electronic community (e-community) has been a vital platform among members of a special interest group (SIG). Compared to other interest groups, technical SIG groups require more beneficial communications and materials to be shared among the members. However, they may encounter a lot of challenges to draw the interest among the members in sharing their knowledge voluntarily. A lot of knowledge sharing researches focuses on how to develop a knowledge sharing system. Hence, they overlook the need to integrate social aspects in the design of such systems. As the result, the systems face inactive participants among the members. In fact, the most crucial part of developing such online communities is on how to encourage users to contribute and share their knowledge. We must discover the underlying problems on why the users are reluctant to share their knowledge through the knowledge sharing system. This paper discusses the survey conducted in order to gain users' perspectives towards such systems for SIG.