This paper describes our research which empirically investigates the applicability of the goal-gradient hypothesis to the activation of user contributions on a popular German Question & Answer community through badges. The goal-gradient hypothesis states that the motivation to reach a goal increases with proximity to the goal. The issue – of interest to academics and website managers alike – is...

Our goal is to increase contributions to an online community by making information about the level of activity in the community salient to its members. We specifically focus on the LiveJournal web log community, where a user’s community is defined by their personal list of friends, and contributions are made by either posting new content to one’s own journal, or by commenting on existing journa...

In today’s dynamic business environment many firms must pursue a series of competitive strategies to survive. According to RBV, these strategies are based upon a firm’s possession of resources and capabilities that are valuable, imperfectly inimitable, non-substitutable, rare and non-transferable. In this paper we extend research on online communities and interfirm performance differences by su...

This paper examines a multidimensional set of learning-engagement behaviors by students participating in a community of inquiry. Existing social-inquiry models of learning focus on students achieving shared understanding through solving well-structured problems. These models may not be appropriate for professionally-oriented, graduate online education where students derive distributed and parti...

Professional development programmes that include teacher collaboration can help teachers meet their professional needs and control their professional lives. They can voice their needs and expectations to peers who share similar experiences. Moreover, teachers can discover new teaching roles and opportunities, develop new skills and find motivation in being a member of a group (Burbank & Kauchak...

Available online 11 March 2009

This research proposes and validates a design theory for digital platforms that support online communities (DPsOC). It addresses ways in which digital platforms can effectively support social interactions in online communities. Drawing upon prior literature on IS design theory, online communities, and platforms, we derive an initial set of propositions for designing effective DPsOC. Our overarc...

We believe that existing models of creativity do not adequately address the distribution of the range of creative acts across individuals in the collaborative creation of media in online environments. In particular we emphasize the fluid nature of users’ transitions between the creative roles of synthesizer, analyzer, and viewer at different phases of production in online video remixing. We ill...