Purpose – The purpose of this study is to explore cultural factors influencing knowledge sharing strategies in virtual communities of practice. Design/methodology/approach – A qualitative research design was employed. Data collection was based on in-depth interviews. The authors assumed that such factors as degree of collectivism, competitiveness, the importance of saving face, in-group orienta...

Audience-bounded online communities require innovative user engagement techniques. Without special efforts focusing on engagement, the contribution volume will likely to be insufficient to maintain a sustainable community-driven system. This paper presents an adaptive approach for user engagement that aims to apply alternative engagement strategies to users with different behavior in the online...

Online communities have something in common: their success rise and fall with the participation rate of active users. In this paper we focus on social rewarding mechanisms that generate benefits for users in order to achieve a higher contribution rate in a wiki system. In an online community, social rewarding is in the majority of cases based on accentuation of the most active members. As money...

Web 2.0-based online communities and social networking platforms in particular are enabling users to create their own content, share this content with anyone they invite and organize connections with existing or new online contacts. The underlying processes are selfdirected and represent a valuable source for creativity and innovation – especially outside firms‟ boundaries. The basis for our re...

Online Communities have been researched for a long time from social, informational as well as economic perspectives. Most approaches up-to-now focussed on the interaction of a number of users with specific communities, are studies about the characteristics of communities in different domains or are general guidelines for the development of these communities. These approaches, however, neglect t...

Considerable research has sought to establish the benefits that technology-mediated online communities offer their members. In an effort to capitalize on these benefits, organizations have been introducing internally oriented communities to support a wide range of tasks. As a result, such communities have become quite common within organizations and it is therefore becoming increasingly importa...

This study intends to contribute to the understanding of online community by empirically answering the question of why community members are willing to making active contributions to their community. The relationships between members’ perceived importance of contribution motivation and their level of contribution in online communities are identified. In addition, the results of factor analysis ...

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 fra...

In an online community, new words come and go: today’s haha may be replaced by tomorrow’s lol. Changes in online writing are usually studied as a social process, with innovations diffusing through a network of individuals in a speech community. But unlike other types of innovation, language change is shaped and constrained by the system in which it takes part. To investigate the links between s...

We design a field experiment to explore the use of social comparison to increase contributions to an online community. We find that, after receiving behavioral information about the median user’s total number of movie ratings, users below the median demonstrate a 530% increase in the number of monthly movie ratings, while those above the median do not necessarily decrease their ratings. When gi...