Special Section Introduction—Online Community as Space for Knowledge Flows

Abstract

O nline communities frequently create significant economic and relational value for community participants and beyond. It is widely accepted that the underlying source of such value is the collective flow of knowledge among community participants. We distinguish the conditions for flows of tacit and explicit knowledge in online communities and advance an unconventional theoretical conjecture: Online communities give rise to tacit knowledge flows between participants. The crucial condition for these flows is not the advent of novel, digital technology as often portrayed in the literature, but instead the technology's domestication by humanity and the sociality it affords. This conjecture holds profound implications for theory and research in the study of management and organization, as well as their relation to information technology.

Building Governance Capability in Online Communities: A Social Network Perspective

“…Although Bartlett and Ghoshal [5] mainly focused on new organisational forms within firms, and Hayek [18] focused on knowledge exchange governance, the view equally applies to online social production. Summing up, explanatory research is needed to investigate how highly distributed interaction and knowledge across networks (Twitter and Gitter) can be integrated and steered towards a coherent collective output in the online community, through examining the dynamic capabilities of users' interactions prior to the existence of the online community (GitPoint; [3,15]). Organisationally, online social production systems combine three core characteristics: "(a) decentralization of conception and execution of problems and solutions, (b) harnessing diverse motivations, and (c) separation of governance and management from property and contract" [7:265].…”

“…Their success in such communities depends somewhat on both "task and relational dimensions of their discussions", therefore, establishing a common understanding of the rules that "should govern group members' behaviours can be key to the success of an online group" [9:596]. This form of governance is especially relevant when large numbers of geographically dispersed individuals interact in support of an internet-mediated activity towards specific outputs [15]. This phenomenon has been described as social production, i.e.…”

A clustering approach to infer Wikipedia contributors' profile

“…One consequence is that over time, the amount of effort needed to add new content increases, since new edits are more likely to be rejected, making the work less rewarding [33,1]. This may also explain, for a part, the contributor turnover [11,22]: once a project is finished, or at least mature, some people, those interested in content addition, drop. As a consequence, there is a constant need for these projects to recruit new contributors, and to turn them into 'big' contributors, to guarantee the survival of the project in the long run.…”

Designing a Peer-Based Support System to Support Shakedown

“…Each peer can therefore take on the role of a learner or that of a lecturer. The overall notion is to construct a realm, in which all peers can learn from each other for peer support and sharing of knowledge (Faraj et al 2016). Davison et al (2013), showing that informal sharing of knowledge increases team performance.…”

“…However, correct content (documentation) has to be matched to the correct context (problem description) to create value-in-use (learner successfully solving problem). The information, which is created for peers should therefore be externalized and made available as content for future reference (Faraj et al 2016).…”