Encouraging Participation in Virtual Communities: the “it-summit-blog” Case

The first national IT-summit in Germany had the goal to communicate the common conviction and objective target of the German government as well as economic and scientific organizations that Germany is on its way to become the ICT-market number one worldwide. Critiques however soon started to complain about the inaccurate representation of SME’s and the German public in general in the planning phase, the event itself, and the follow up process of the IT-summit. The offline community of the IT-summit was migrated into a virtual online counterpart – the “IT-summit-blog” weblog. The purpose of this approach was to improve the efficiency and ability to support the sharing of information and knowledge in a very timely fashion about summit topics even among all those that could not participate in the discussion yet. The collective knowledge generated out of this “think tank” is used by reintegrating and using it in the follow-up-process as regards content of the summit. The case at hand identifies the success factors needed to develop such a virtual communication platform. The discussion is underplayed with a theoretical debate about the conceptual foundations concerning virtual communities in general, and weblogs specifically. This discussion shows that no virtual community is like another. Modern communication platforms need to be tailored towards the specific need they were built for. This counts especially for weblogs as the sort of platform chosen for the project at hand, as well as for the specific reason the platform was developed for – namely the discussion of ITsummit-topics. The need for control and moderation of user generated contributions conflicts with the grass roots democracy concept of weblogs in general. Thus, the goal of this paper is to find the appropriate standards, key issues, and requirements of a platform as envisioned by the summit participants in order to form a coherent basis for the development of the “IT-summit-blog”. The mismatch between the initial conception of the blog and the identified need for structural changes after 6 month of operations will also be highlighted.