A Socio-Technical Approach for Topic Community Member Selection

Wicked problems and social complexity abound in our globalizing, ever more complex society [6]. Wicked problems, such as many socioeconomic and environmental issues, cannot be solved in traditional ways, as no perfect solution can be found. Also, the understanding of the problem evolves as the solution is being worked on, but no clear agreement on what the real problem is can be reached. The only way to seriously address these problems is by examining a wide range of possible solutions, argumentations, and viewpoints by as many stakeholders as possible [13, 6]. Classical organizations, like governments and official scientific bodies, are no longer capable of representing these interests on their own. New forms of agile social structures are needed, covering a wide spectrum of public interests instead of limited national or organizational interests. Communities, as cornerstones of civil society, play a key role in representing the public interest. They do for the public good what markets do on behalf of aggregated private interests [4]. Communities have discovered the bottom-up use of cyberspace, a space of distributed power, as a way to transform society [16], making them important catalysts of societal