Online Communities have been researched for a long time from social, informational as well as economic perspectives. Most approaches up-to-now focussed on the interaction of a number of users with specific communities, are studies about the characteristics of communities in different domains or are general guidelines for the development of these communities. These approaches, however, neglect t...

Considerable research has sought to establish the benefits that technology-mediated online communities offer their members. In an effort to capitalize on these benefits, organizations have been introducing internally oriented communities to support a wide range of tasks. As a result, such communities have become quite common within organizations and it is therefore becoming increasingly importa...

This study intends to contribute to the understanding of online community by empirically answering the question of why community members are willing to making active contributions to their community. The relationships between members’ perceived importance of contribution motivation and their level of contribution in online communities are identified. In addition, the results of factor analysis ...

It is increasingly common for online communities to rely on members rather than editors to contribute and moderate content. To motivate members to perform these tasks, some sites display social comparisons, information designed to show members how they compare to others in the system. For example, Amazon, an online book store, shows a list of top reviewers. In this study, we investigate the eff...

With the rapid development and advancement of virtual communities and collaboration, it raises both opportunities and challenges for the online community members. Professional online communities have formed and flourished rapidly with the proliferation of network access in the past two decades. This study aims to explore the activeness of professional online community members by proposing a fra...

Although many online vendors have sponsored virtual communities (VCs) in the hope of reaping commercial benefits from it, not many have been successful in reaping commercial benefits from their VC. Online vendors can benefit greatly from having a VC, if the VC members can be converted into online buyers. This study examines the conversion of a VC member into an online buyer. Using a classical-c...

Online participation and content contribution are pillars of the Internet revolution and are core activities for younger generations online. This study investigated participation patterns, users' contributions and gratification mechanisms, as well as the gender differences of Israeli learners in the Scratch online community. The findings showed that: (1) Participation patterns reveal two distin...

In this commentary, we review definition frameworks for community health and examine factors having core relevance to shaping the meaning of this term and growing field. We conclude by suggesting a potential framework for conceptualizing and advancing this field of public health practice through improved understanding of the meaning, scope, and science of community health.

We examine consumer social learning from distributed inquiry capabilities in online communities. Using an inquiry-action framework rooted in pragmatic learning theory, we longitudinally trace community inquiry processes and their link to individual action in six health-related online communities. Our interpretive analyses reveal leaps and lapses in social learning. Generative learning is eviden...