Encouraging Participation in Virtual Communities

From Information Systems at Pitt Business

A virtual community can be seen as a group in which individuals come together around a shared purpose, interest, or goal. Most depend on electronic communications to support interaction among members who are not physically collocated. Developers must simultaneously deal with communication, motivation, leadership, and technology.

Communication
     • Communication dynamics to be changed
     • Low social presence
     • Inhibition in building trust

Motivation
     • Much effort needed to discover and manage common goals and interests of community members

Leadership
     • Ensuring adequate levels of community activity and membership growth
     • Developing supportive climate

Technology
     • High cost for connections to Internet
     • Low-quality and low-speed lines for Internet connections
     • Skills needed for a range of computer technologies

Virtual communities are sustainable only when they provide benefits that surpass the costs of membership. An important element of a viable community is the ongoing provision of content that members perceive as valuable or useful. A survey finds that posting activity is influenced by offline interaction and that viewing activity is affected by perceived usefulness.

[edit] Abstract

The Internet revolution has led to the proliferation of virtual communities. Within organizations, many traditionally offline, face-to-face meetings and team activities (such as quality circles, six sigma teams, and communities of practice) now take place online in the form of virtual communities. Meanwhile, the growth of Internet community service providers (such as iVillage.com and Daum.net) has been phenomenal.

What do businesses need to know about them? Understanding virtual community development provides a foundation for facilitating collaboration and learning among individuals separated by physical distance and organizational boundaries. Migrating offline communities into online virtual communities has the potential to greatly improve their efficiency and ability to support the sharing of critical information and knowledge in a timely fashion. And changing our view of organizations—from focused on command-and-control hierarchies to focused on networks of competency-based virtual communities—promises a radically different set of organizational design options. However, realizing this promise depends on our ability to develop and maintain communities in which individuals have both the opportunity and the motivation to participate and contribute. This paper explores the factors that stimulate participants’ posting and viewing of community content— two key activities in the ongoing dynamics of any virtual community.

[edit] Paper Information

Authors: Joon Koh, Young-Gul Kim, Brian Butler, and Gee-Woo Bock

To read more check out the paper at Encouraging Participation in Virtual Communities

This article was originally published in CACM

[edit] Keywords

online communities, participation, community of practice