Exploring the Activeness of Professional Online Community Members

With the rapid development and advancement of virtual communities and collaboration, it raises both opportunities and challenges for the online community members. Professional online communities have formed and flourished rapidly with the proliferation of network access in the past two decades. This study aims to explore the activeness of professional online community members by proposing a framework that built upon the Self-Determination Theory. Extant studies on motivation of online community members activeness mostly focus on extrinsic motivation in terms of rewards. We investigate users’ behavior with their intrinsic motivation from the prospective of individuals’ immanent psychological needs. Specially, we investigate the consistency between community discussion topics and the user’s interests, and define it as attraction level. We believe that higher attraction level will lead to higher user activeness. Empirical data will be tested in the future.