Tipping the Balance - Drivers and Barriers for Participation in a Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration Community

In this paper we report our efforts to elicit an understanding of drivers and barriers for participation in a Web2.0 online community platform to support the unique collection of virtual collaboration requirements inherent in inter-organization, cross-cultural, and cross-discipline team environments that comprise the Atlantis community. Atlantis is a grant program to stimulate and fund the organization of dual degree master programs between consortia of European and American Universities. The key challenge in this project is neither the analysis nor construction of the online community platform (though neither is in itself a trivial task), but rather the question of how to encourage use of such a platform, and its evolution into a self-sustaining community. We report our findings from a workshop, interviews and a survey to gain understanding in the drivers and barriers of participation. The drivers and barriers are then presented as a design framework for an online learning community.