Design Principles for Platform-Enabled Knowledge Commons with an Expository Instantiation

Abstract

Knowledge commons play a pivotal role in knowledge creation and sharing in the digital economy. The motivation for this research was the opportunity to develop a knowledge commons for IT service management (ITSM) practitioners. To obtain guidance to design the knowledge commons, we critically reviewed commons design principles (DPs) that were based on a well-established economics theory. We observed that the commons DPs had significant gaps when applied to IS practice. Hence, we developed an alternate set of DPs that we refer to as platform-enabled knowledge commons (PEKC) DPs that are relevant to IS practice. This paper discusses the development of PEKC DPs and applies them in instantiating an IS artifact, Service-Symphony. Service-Symphony is a purpose-built, public-facing knowledge repository developed for the benefit of ITSM practitioners and students. Our research followed the design science research (DSR) paradigm and contributes to the body of knowledge by establishing a multigrounded design theory comprising meta-requirements and DPs. To bridge theory and practice, we assessed the reusability of PEKC DPs through focus group interviews with IS architects. Our case study illustrates the complete life cycle of DPs covering conceptualization, initial formulation, iterative refinement, application to an important real-world instantiation, and evaluation by a group of independent IS practitioners.