Structure of Expertise in IT Communities of Practice: the Case of Stack Overflow in Russian

Transition to globalization and “network society” force professionals to draw the professional knowledge outside an organization, that is why online communities of practice are becoming an integral part of professional communication. Professional communities of practice rise to the country-level or international-level knowledge sharing and specialists choose the attractive and relevant way of intra-professional interaction. This paper study the integration of Stack Overflow (the largest question and answers site for ICT specialists) and its localized analogue Stack Overflow in Russian. The author discovered an explicit differentiation among in-country oriented and internationally oriented professionals in Russian-language IT community of practice. According to the results, more “cosmopolitan” workers, those, who prefer the international professional online community, hold more advantageous positions on the IT market because of the broader access to beneficial resources.