Online communities sustainability: some economic issues

There is a growing attention being placed on community networking and community informatics, due to the role both can play in building the Information Society. Hence, the issue of the sustainability of online communities becomes more and more relevant: multiple aspects – social, institutional and economical – have to be jointly analyzed to understand how and if a project is really worthwhile. In this paper we address the economic sustainability aspect, a key component still not deeply investigated. Actually, survival and growth are common themes in the organizational and businesses literature since the beginning of the ‘60’s, nevertheless, online communities only partly comply with the available frameworks and we are left with a panorama where communities emerge and evolve as if they were either completely bottom-up, unplanned entities or rational top down quasiorganizations. Hence, our aim is to offer a first attempt to define several theoretical propositions on economical sustainability, mainly derived from our ongoing experience and research on online communities.