Dear Tania,

I do not know what you understand as knowledge distribution. I mean, publicity and marketing cannot be part of knowledge transfer among scientists.  

No, of course, András. It´is not about publicity and marketing. We´re talking about sharing tacit knowledge and building new ones, in order to improve work skills. It is something that I know aour speciallists do in not official places, like collegues meetings, encounters, breaks, or so. We want to use these websites as virtual spaces for that too. We think that implementing communities of practice can help a lot.

Drawing Learning Charters, available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254583109_Drawing_Learning_Charters, may be of interest. That article offers the template of a statement of intent, purposes and results, commitments to corporate action, and commitments to individual action that the members of a community of practice might be invited to adapt and subscribe to.

PS: On Knowledge Behaviors, available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266477251_On_Knowledge_Behaviors, may also be of related interest. That article makes the commonsensical point that designing jobs for knowledge behaviors and then recruiting people who are positive about sharing to start with will boost knowledge stocks and flows at low cost. In your case, there would be such opportunities when drafting the terms or reference and onboarding core group, inner circle, and outer circle members.

Article Drawing Learning Charters

Article On Knowledge Behaviors

I am worried because I do not think there is a culture and the habit of sharing knowledge among our colleagues in our network. This can affect the functioning of the communities of practice to be implemented.  Does anyone know how to generate motivations and confidence to overcome this difficulty?

Firstly we might need to investigate what is the root cause of not sharing knowledge among employees e.g. job insecurity, rivalry, don't know how to etc. before addressing the root cause(s).  Generally, we can improve the knowledge sharing behavior either through carrot or stick approach.  Carrot approach is to incentivize employees when there is evidence of knowledge sharing.  Stick approach is to force / require them to share knowledge with others.  Both carrot & stick approaches can be instilled as part of the year end performance appraisal.  Once qualified knowledge is shared, they should be explicitly documented / stored in appropriate repository / knowledge base for future reuse / reference.  Moreover, quality of the shared knowledge also need to be monitored & managed by assigning a knowledge management team to qualify, collect, sanitize etc. before deposit them into the repository.

I suggest that you push on and make sure you have a small group of like minded individuals who are supportive of this approach who can help you with your endeavours. What you will find is that if the web site has highly engaging, relevant content, then more people will want to access it as time goes by.

A good example of a collaborative wiki type of approach to curating/collating information is Radiopaedia-

https://radiopaedia.org/