Encouraging participation in virtual communities

Abstract

Leaders of robust, sustainable virtual communities find ways tostrengthen their members' sense of social identity and motivate their participation in the community's activities.

Measuring perceived social presence in distributed learning groups

“…In synchronous and asynchronous learning groups social presence (Short, Williams, & Christie, 1976) is an important determinant for both participation (Koh, Kim, Butler, & Bock, 2007;Shen, Khalifa, & Yu, 2006;Stacey, 2000) and social interaction Garrison, 1997;Lowenthal, 2010;Swan, 2002;. Inspired by telepresence research (Lombard & Ditton, 1997) we define social presence as the degree of illusion that others appear to be a "real" physical persons in either an immediate (i.e., real time/synchronous) or a delayed (i.e., time-deferred/asynchronous) communication episode.…”

Noise or Quality? Cross-Nested Hierarchical Effects of Culture on Online Ratings

“…On eBay, for instance, consumers from all over the world provide ratings on marketplace participants, and, on www.stackexchange.com, raters from many different national and occupational cultures rate practice-related answers and industry commentary. However, with cultural diversity comes different thought patterns, values, and culturally defined norms among the different raters (Gallagher & Savage, 2013;Koh, Kim, Butler, & Bock, 2007;O'Reilly, Chatman, & Caldwell, 1991;Rui & Stefanone, 2013;Schein, 2010;Triandis, 1994). These differences may adversely influence rating practices (i.e., an individual's propensity to give positive or negative ratings) in feedback systems, because culture plays an important role in determining how groups of individuals are socialized to behave and think (O'Reilly et al, 1991;Qiu, Lin, & Leung, 2013).…”

A Design Theory for IT Supporting Online Communities

“…In fact, internal IT staffers and also external consultants and practitioners must be aware of the specific requirements which underpin IT artifacts supporting online communities together with the principles for managing them. These capabilities are also useful for customer relationship managers who are obliged to change their ways for interacting with customers and exploit the potential of the new tools [2] [14].…”

“…According with Koh et al [14], realizing sustainable online communities depends on the ability to develop and maintain communities in which individuals have both the opportunity and the motivation to participate and contribute. Moreover, IT systems features available to online community members must be appropriate to the task at hand and must satisfy their needs in terms of ease of use [16].…”

“…Furthermore, sustainability is related to members' attraction/retention which depend on membership size and communication activities (i.e. post, view) [4] [14]. In this proposal, the value of an online community increases quadratically with the number of participants and since participation in online communities is voluntary based, the main purpose in this context is to ensure the sustainability of a community.…”