The paper studies social workers’ online communities of practice and presents the perceptions of their members about such online communities’ potential for establishing relationships and trust. The interviewees expressed three main clusters of reasons for why relationships and trust cannot be properly established and sustained through online communities of practice. These reasons involve genera...

The financial success of online communities based on multiplayer game environments has been a bright spot among the many failures in electronic commerce initiatives. While this form of business has existed for less than a decade, it is growing rapidly and has become a mainstream form of entertainment in some areas of the world, such as Korea. Game environments are becoming more immersive and co...

While the question how community design influences user behaviors in online communities has recently attracted considerable research, few studies empirically evaluate the influencing factors of specific user behaviors. Building on Ren et al.’s (2007) conceptual framework of identity-based vs. bond-based attachment in online communities, this study evaluates the influence of numerous antecedents...

The Internet was introduced in Saudi Arabia1 in late January 1999 after a long period of discussion and consultation within the Saudi authorities. These resulted in a tailored version being made available to the Saudi public. To enable this, a huge filter system was set up in Riyadh in conjunction with an American company. The reason for having such a filter system was that the Saudi authoritie...

This research aims to provide an understanding of knowledge sharing behavior through the adaptation of two major theories imported from Social Psychology: the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) and the Theory of Planned Behavior (TpB). Exploring knowledge sharing from a social psychological perspective provides an understanding of the process an individual goes through to make the decision to shar...

Both authors of this paper have been engaged in the community networking movement and its evolution for many years in an ongoing effort to help create online systems that meet human needs. Among other things, community networks are intended to help address shared "public affairs" in geographical areas. Although this goal is important and laudable, community networking communities are often unab...

In this paper we examine the possibility of evaluating the value of an online community in a company by focusing on the practices around the online community, which we call active lurking. We divided the practices into two types: independent practices that are completed within only an informal context, and connecting practices that have relationships with the formal organizational structure. We...

Understanding what motivates participation in online innovation communities is now possible given the recent explosion of opportunities for joining such communities. This article reports on the results of a survey of participants in a specific online innovation community to characterise and find correlations between motivation and participation styles. An analysis of the survey results show: th...

While online communities of various nature proliferate in cyberspace, our understanding of the reasons underlying their success or failure is still at the initial stage. The present study contributes to this area through examining an abortive attempt to build an online learning community of part-time postgraduate students. The objective is to identify design considerations and strategies for ex...