The potential affordances of enterprise wikis for creating community in research networks

In this paper, we describe some of the affordances, (the specific enabling features or characteristics), of an enterprise wiki to meet the needs of a developing community of practice. The Social Innovation Network (SInet) is a nascent research network that spans the social sciences, education and commerce at the University of Wollongong. It will use the enterprise wiki software Confluence to assist in the development of communities of practice across its groups and subgroups. This paper, describes some of the features of the software and how it might be used to perform some of the common activities identified by Wenger (nd) as contributing to the development of community.