Online communities are common means to maintain and extend private social networks. In addition, they also offer new ways for enterprises to connect and collaborate with customers, employees, and business partners. However, key challenge for online communities is engaging community members thereby keeping the community successful and alive. This is especially true for communities, which leverag...

With the rapid growth of social networks and the increased rate of adoption by patients, healthcare organizations are progressively adopting online community-based initiatives to conduct healthcare activities. Considering the enormous potential online communities hold, for practitioners to get closer to their patients, online communities could be effectively utilized to conduct health managemen...

This study investigates the determinants and effects of virtual communities on the development of social relationships within the social network of cancer patients. Influencing factors on the formation of virtual relationships and their effect in the form of social assistance are researched. Following an explorative approach it is examined whether online communities meet their theoretical poten...

Both authors of this paper have been engaged in the community networking movement and its evolution for many years in an ongoing effort to help create online systems that meet human needs. Among other things, community networks are intended to help address shared "public affairs" in geographical areas. Although this goal is important and laudable, community networking communities are often unab...

This study extends the IT acceptance research by proposing an engagement model that supports acceptance and use of online social network systems. Using the proposed model, this research demonstrates that sponsors of online communities created through online social networks can increase the member engagement in these online communities. The primary contribution of this research is deepening insi...

The practitioners of community networking sense that its nature as a “Movement” is ending. But what does that mean? As daily life online becomes ordinary, and as capacity to engender community online becomes an ordinary function of daily life, what is effective in advancing community networking as a community of practice? How can we get a clear view of community networking as radical practice i...

In recent years, our research group has been investigating the use of computing technology to support noviceoriented computer-based musical activities. CODES (Cooperative Music Prototyping Design) is a Web-based environment designed to allow novice users to create musical prototypes through combining basic sound patterns. This paper shows how CODES has been changed to provide support to some co...

There is a growing interest in designing incentives to foster “green” or prosocial behavior in environment sustainability. We show that online social network is conducive to energy saving behavior through social influence. Using data collected from online community Carbonrally.com, we show that slower growing groups perform better in energy reduction. In addition, we also show that the strength...

Despite the growing importance of online communities in creating knowledge and facilitating collaboration, there has been limited research examining the role of leaders in such settings. In this paper, we propose a framework that integrates behavioral and structural approaches to explore the antecedents of leadership in online communities focused on knowledge work. Specifically, we propose that...

Online communities are connecting hordes of individuals and generating rich social network data. The social capital that resides within these networks is largely unknown. We propose to create a general framework for measuring and leveraging social capital based upon explicit social networks, implicit affinities, and the mobilization of social resources. The resulting quantitative models are use...