Towards an Evaluation Methodology for the Development of Research-Oriented Virtual Communities

A virtual community is a group of people whose shared needs and/or interests are largely communicated within, and mediated by Webenabled interactions, e.g., within a Website. While some virtual communities (e.g., Motley Fool) have flourished, many sites designed for online collaboration have failed to succeed as virtual communities, places for people to hang out and collaborate online. In order to design effective virtual communities, we need methods to evaluate the usability and effectiveness of collaborative environments, and the degree to which they function as virtual communities (VCs). Our concern in this paper is to explore, through the discussion of a pilot study of a research-purposed VC, how to evaluate a VC infrastructure.