Designing Virtual Communities to support E-Commerce adoption

In the context of the ECAMP IST European project we are designing a virtual community as a means for helping managers from Small Medium size Enterprises (SMEs) to better understand, develop, evaluate and implement ECommerce projects in the B2B area. In the first part of the paper, we evaluate the importance of designing virtual communities addressing SME managers, and in particular how such knowledgeexchange networks can facilitate and accelerate the adoption of E-commerce practices. In the second part, we examine how technology can be used to provide support to such a virtual community and derive a set of design principles. In particular, this section explains that beyond providing digital communication means, the technology should also be used to support much more deeply the social process (opinion, reputation, trust, and coordination). Finally, we illustrate how these virtual communities design principles are being applied in the context of the ECAMP project.