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...

The pervasiveness of the Internet and social media has fostered the spread of online communities, collectives which have been interchangeably called virtual communities in the scholarly literature. In spite of the diffusion of Internet-mediated collectives, research on the domain has not yet paid enough attention to how institutional environments influence virtual interactions in general and on...

As online health communities (OHCs) grow, users find it challenging to properly search, read, and contribute to the community because of its overwhelming content. Our goal is to understand OHC users’ needs and requirements for better delivering large-scale OHC content. We interviewed 14 OHC users with interests in diabetes to investigate their attitudes and needs towards using OHCs and 2 OHC ad...

Purpose: While most literature concerning knowledge sharing examines it as an organizational method for innovation and value creation, this paper considers online knowledge sharing as an individual behavior decision embedded in a virtual community. We attempt to explore which sharing behavior can help individual participants gain a better position in an online community, improving social status...

As online communities are becoming more and more relevant to business, it is critical to understand why individuals are motivated to contribute content longitudinally. In this paper, we draw on existing literature on motivation and technology characteristics to conceptualize a model of longitudinal content contribution. We view longitudinal content contribution phenomenon as a recursive process...

Learning through social interactions (Online communities)

Increasingly, online systems depend on user contributions such as posts, ratings, tags, and comments. Many of these systems wish to encourage broader participation or the contribution of higher quality content. In this doctoral consortium paper, I present past work and propose future work on understanding user motivations to contribute online and on the use of personalization technology and inc...

Educators have traditionally found professional development opportunities difficult to pursue for a myriad of reasons. From a lack of relevance, to the difficulties presented by the challenges of time and place, professional development has often been an elusive goal. However, the advent of technological innovations in the area of communication technology is seen as a potential solution to thes...

This study looked at the significance of family and local community connections in determining online community engagement amongst a sample of older people in the south of England. Four catalysts were identified which motivated engagement with local and online forms of community and these were: family, roles, loss and ‘spaces and places’. SNS use (primarily Facebook) was largely family-focussed...

Identity plays a key role in virtual communities. In communication, which is the primary activity, knowing the identity of those with whom you communicate is essential for understanding and evaluating an interaction. Yet in the disembodied world of the virtual community, identity is also ambiguous. Many of the basic cues about personality and social role we are accustomed to in the physical wor...