Emergence in Nascent Online Communities: An Affordance Perspective

Online communities like Wikipedia have the potential to transform our global society. Despite their growing importance, however, the extant literature has theorized only little about how member contribution behavior in a nascent online community emerges in interaction with the materiality of the technology platform. Studying this is critical for understanding the important early stage evolution of online communities. Without a rich history, the platform’s materiality is almost the only thing that members can use to make sense of the online community. We investigate this question by applying a mixedmethod approach to a longitudinal case study of AshokaHub, a nascent global online community of social entrepreneurs. We use an affordance perspective and our findings to date suggest that the materiality of the technology platform plays an important role in the emergence of member contribution behavior in the nascent online community. Moreover, they suggest extensions to the concepts of affordances and imbrication.