Exploiting the collective knowledge of communities of experts: The case of conference ranking

In this paper, we discuss the concept of tacit collective knowledge and focus on how to externalize it to inform discussion and reflective thinking within a community of expert practitioners about their own distributed practices. We draw our approach by outlining the one we undertook in the domain of a scholarly community: how to assess the quality of scientific conferences in the broad area of computer science and IT study. Results show the feasibility and scalability of the approach adopted to externalize tacit collective knowledge.