Many operators of online communities severely struggle with overcoming the nonparticipation of users and with persuading users to contribute to their platform’s online activities. However, a critical mass of active members who are willing to contribute is necessary in order to make an online community interesting and appealing to existing and potential new users. In this research, we investigat...

A hard challenge facing developers of online communities is attaining a critical mass of members and subsequently sustaining their participation. We propose a new mechanism for motivating participation in interest-based online communities, which engages non-contributing members (lurkers) by modeling and visualizing the asymmetrical relations formed when reading, evaluating, or commenting other ...

Only a match between user’s motives and incentives enables an engaging online community. The purpose of this paper is to synthesize the literature on user motivation in online communities into a conceptual framework. The framework categorizes motivational factors along motives and potential incentives and integrates the three major motives need for power, need for achievement and need for affil...

In order to encourage users to participate more actively and bring more contributions to peer-to-peer (p2p) online communities, we propose to create a motivational community visualization based on the social comparison theory. This paper describes the design of static version and a dynamic version of this visualization developed in our lab, explains the advantages and the disadvantages of the s...

In the last decade, collaborative open production communities have provided an effective platform for geographically dispersed users to collaborate and generate content in a well-structured and consistent form. Wikipedia is a prominent example in this area. What is of great importance in production communities is the prioritization and evolution of features with regards to the community lifecyc...

Online participation and content contribution are pillars of the Internet revolution and are core activities for younger generations online. This study investigated participation patterns, users' contributions and gratification mechanisms, as well as the gender differences of Israeli learners in the Scratch online community. The findings showed that: (1) Participation patterns reveal two distin...

We examine consumer social learning from distributed inquiry capabilities in online communities. Using an inquiry-action framework rooted in pragmatic learning theory, we longitudinally trace community inquiry processes and their link to individual action in six health-related online communities. Our interpretive analyses reveal leaps and lapses in social learning. Generative learning is eviden...

This study contributes to the understanding of online communities by examining why community members are willing to make active contributions to their community. A model of motivation for such contributions was developed and tested within the context of an online travel community. The results of a factor analysis and a series of reliability tests indicate that the motivation model is valid and ...

Hypothesis Hypothesis1: Trust is positively related to empathy in patient online communities (POC). Hypothesis2: Social identity is positively related to expressions of empathy within patient online communities. Hypothesis 3: Development of shared social identity is positively related to the likelihood that an individual will share personal knowledge or experiences in a POC. Hypothesis 4: Empat...

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...