Traditionally, knowledge communities have been organised around activities, which can be classed as both work and play. In the new self-conscious knowledge communities, purposes can arise from virtually any common interest. Unlike traditional organisations, knowledge communities do not have single purposes, such as making a profit or playing a game. They have multiple purposes around a common interest. Often, the boundaries between commerce and voluntarism, work and play or managers and workers are blurred.
Computer networks link people and their ideas in new ways without virtually any effort or even cost.
The challenge is to make the experience of new linkages meaningful and purposeful in a context in which every recipient relates to and manages information content in their own way. It is a process that cannot be managed, although it can be influenced by inviting people to share common practices, such as sharing a classification schema for a common filing system. A major drawback of most knowledge communities is that they lack the skills necessary to create something as basic as a common classification schema. The interesting fact is that despite the drawbacks, virtual communities continue to mushroom in cyberspace with the growth of online communities, such as Fortune City, continuing on the World Wide Web the trend started by the rapid proliferation of newsgroups in the email domain. The truth must be that people do manage to learn more and share their knowledge more widely, or they wouldn't keep doing it.