Knowledge Seeking and Knowledge Sharing in a nonprofit organizational partner network: a social network analysis

摘要

This research empirically examines the online social network of a national, non-profit organization which we refer to as the national alliance to reduce violence (NARV), an organization designed to bridge the gap between non-profit organizations across the US which address the issue of interpersonal violence. As a network of practice, knowledge shared by the nonprofit organizations originates across a breadth of experts in the disciplines of advocacy, science, practice and policy. Two problems served as the motivation for this research. First, how does the online network structure support current knowledge contribution and knowledge retrieval within the network? Second, how could the online network structure enhance knowledge contribution and knowledge retrieval to meet the needs of the organization? We acquired network structure and knowledge sharing data through the collection of survey responses from NARV's membership list. The data were analyzed as a two-mode affiliation network using UCINET, a popular application for social network analysis. For the first research question, we found that the action groups of research and public awareness are positioned to be strong sources of knowledge contribution within the current network due to the number of nodes with whom they are connected. For the second research question, we identified training and mentoring as the action group from which other nodes desire knowledge.