Social and Distributed Cognition in Knowledge Management Systems

Many organizations rely on information and communication technologies (ICTs) to provide solutions to the perennial problem of supporting individuals and groups, performing interrelated tasks, who need to coordinate what they know. Yet we have seen many limitations in the use of ICTs to mediate and coordinate distributed and dynamic knowledge sharing. Organizations must grapple with issues such as how partial knowledge is shared across functional and task-related application domains, how knowledge-work practices in different workgroups are defined and coordinated, and how knowledge is embedded in various forms of ICT. These issues are all related to distributed ways of knowing. The papers in this minitrack explore the complexities and synergies of collaborative work, viewed through the lens of distributed and socially-shared cognition.