A community based approach to blended learning in universities

In the software production industry the application of new methodologies, e.g. “agile software development”, has determined the rising of new software value chains. Through such methodologies, the main companies try to capitalize the knowledge of various categories of stakeholders, recruiting them in virtual communities in order to stimulate the cooperation among company, partners and clients in supporting the lifecycle of software development. In order to promote the circulation of the knowledge of software products, some companies make collaborative tools and shared spaces available. “Corporate blogs and blogosphere” can be the technological key to take advantage of the distributed knowledge in the community. However, it is still necessary to define ‘how’ and to ‘what’ extent a corporate blogosphere may influence the management of software development. This is why the present work introduces a statistical method in order to investigate whether a corporate blogosphere is only a part of the corporate communication/marketing strategy or it is a mean for mobilizing the software value chain and, eventually, an innovative way for the software development process. Successively, we present main results of the method application to a case study, which validate the proposed approach.