Evaluation of Expertise in a Virtual Community of Practice: The Case of Stack Overflow

• Published in: Digital Transformation and Global Society pp. 483 - 491
• Main Author: Menshikova, Anastasiia
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing
• Series: Communications in Computer and Information Science
• Subjects: Online community of practice; Overlapping community; User expertise
• ISBN: 9783030028428; 3030028429
• ISSN: 1865-0929; 1865-0937
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-02843-5_40

Virtual communities of practice are becoming more and more efficient for professional knowledge sharing. Thus, most active internet platforms where professionals exchange their experience could be considered as the representation of current professional knowledge state. In this work in progress we analyse the structure of professional knowledge in IT sphere through the investigation of Stack Overflow. An analysis of bipartite network which connects question tags and IDs of users with the help of overlapping community detection algorithm allows to identify the intersections of different skill areas. Meaning the user reputation, we examine whether having the competencies in several areas at the same time (e.g., several programming languages) is more profitable for professionals than specific skills in the narrow field or not. The long-term goal of our study is to develop a metrics for the evaluation of user’s professional expertise and professional knowledge complexity based on the skills overlap.