The issue of knowledge management in a distributed network is receiving increasing attention from both scientific and industrial organizations. Research efforts in this field are motivated by the awareness that knowledge is more and more perceived as a primary economic resource and that, in the context of organization of organizations, the augmented management complexity of its whole life cycle requires new reference models. In this article, we build on recent research work to propose a distributed knowledge management framework that can be used in several application domains. We characterize the dimension of social influences in terms of identity, negotiation and trust modeling them within a framework that can augment learning and cooperation capabilities through knowledge sharing and effective communication. A particular instance of the presented framework, to handle the problem of risk management in enterprise alliance partnership, is discussed as a case study that shows the practical applicability of our approach. (Contains 4 figures.)