At both social and technical levels, it is very difficult and time-consuming to identify experts. For example, socially, experts may not wish to be identified, perhaps concerned that they might have their inboxes flooded with questions or requests. Technically, it is difficult to appropriately route information requests and to come up with satisfactory ontologies for classifying expertise. Both DICA and Answer Garden 2 suffer from this problem. Nonetheless, requiring the classification and rating of expertise may continue a problematic trend towards organizations trying to quantify and interchange employees.
People prefer to seek information within their customary social networks.
Our systems do not force a dichotomy between experts and non-experts, which is an important goal. Creating such a dichotomy would restrict the collective learning and force users into secondary roles within their own work life. However, these systems do tend to bracket off the sociable from task-related information seeking. Still, cyberspace technologies push in novel directions, as the Web has done, and designers should consider the interplay of social and technical as much as possible. You can observe a lot just by watching.