Communities of practice and renewable distributed eergy: the CIVIS experience

By drawing on the experience of CIVIS, a recently EU/FP7 funded project, the aim of this paper is to explore how community dynamics can foster new forms of social innovation and knowledge sharing in the domain of renewable energies. Recent works have been mainly studying how community dynamics could improve performance in business and social settings in various work related domains. From a technological perspective, particular attention has been given on how new ICT developments, in particular the web, have provided new opportunities for communities to form and interact also on-line, giving birth to the so-called virtual communities. On the other hand, no attention has been given to the role of communities in exploiting the value of another type of emerging technological network, namely, the distributed renewable energy network. In this network, people and groups, also through the use of ICTs and the web, can autonomously produce and consume energy on the base of a common identity and ...