LESSONS ON FIRE: A Participatory and Knowledge-based platform

Knowledge Management (KM) is one of the hottest topics today in both the industry world and information research world. In our daily life, we deal with huge amount of data and information. Data and information is not knowledge until we know how to dig the value out of it. This is the reason we need Knowledge Management. Unfortunately, there is no universal definition of knowledge management, just as there is no agreement as to what constitutes knowledge in the first place (UNC, 2014). Davenport (1994) defines KM as the process of capturing, developing, sharing, and effectively using organizational knowledge. Many recent authors suggest that the use of Virtual Communities of Practice (VCoP) based on Web 2.0 tools is a new paradigm for the KM of organizations (Kabbas Al-ghamdi et al., 2015). As described in Wenger (1998), a Community of Practice (CoP) is defined as groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis. If a community was created under Web technologies and works through the Web, it is called Virtual Community of Practice. Virtual communities can be defined as ‘Groups of professionals brought together by shared goals and common concerns regarding participation, exchange, trading, organizing and management of their tacit and explicit in order to improve their professional performance, as well as the performance of their organizations as a whole’. These communities are characterized by self-regulation (Kabbas Al-ghamdi et al., 2015).