Wiki communities in the context of work processes

In this article we examine the integration of communities of practice supported by a wiki into work processes. Linear structures are often inappropriate for the execution of knowledge-intensive tasks and work processes. The latter are characterized by non-linear sequences and dynamic social interaction. Communities of practice, however, often lack the guiding light needed to structure their work. We discuss the primary requirements for the integration of formally described knowledge-intensive processes into the dynamic social processes of knowledge generation in communities of practice and use the wiki approach for their support. We present our approach for an appropriate interface to integrate wiki communities into process structures and an information retrieval algorithm based on it to connect the process-oriented structures with community-oriented wiki structures. We show the prototypical realization of the concept by a brief example.