Howard Rheingold’s (1993) book The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier was the first to bring virtual communities to the attention of researchers and practitioners. Although virtual groups have been examined previously, Rheingold’s descriptions of participating in the WELL, an Internet-based bulletin board, vividly portrayed the potential of online social groupings. Rhein...

At any given time, the stability of a community depends on the right balance of trust and distrust. Furthermore, we face information overload, increased uncertainty and risk taking as a prominent feature of modern living. As members of society, we cope with these complexities and uncertainties by relying trust, which is the basis of all social interactions. Although a small number of trust mode...

The success of open source software like Apache or Linux not only attracts practitioners of IS to look more thoroughly on the development processes of these communities but also attracts researchers to take a closer look on how these communities work. At first glance open source software development is seemingly chaotic and anarchistic (Kuwabara, 2000). However, successful open source software ...

We have been experiencing an explosion in the market of social websites that aim not only to entertain us, but also to help us enlarge our professional networks, to redefine business models and capture new customers, to modify the way learning and teaching are performed, among others. So far, little research has been done on what drives individuals to contribute to online communities, as there ...

often utilize a decentralized network supported by “peer-to-peer” (P2P) technology, which is a computer network that relies on the computing power of and the participants in the network. Such networks are useful for sharing audio and video data or anything in digital format. P2P technology serves as an infrastructure for virtual knowledge communities, where interactive relationships are establi...

The information society has reached a new era of communication and knowledge management. Virtual communities are emerging as a requirement in this new information distribution scheme. We investigate the concept of virtual knowledge communities using an agent-based abstraction. In this field, there is a need for evaluating the performances and the quality of a global system resulting from the be...

Adopting the view that virtual communities are an important part of today’s social fabric, this study investigates the relationships between different factors commonly used to measure people’s attitudes towards virtual communities. The study reviews existing research in both traditional non virtual and virtual communities to build a more inclusive factor model which includes the idea of motivat...

This article is a synthesis of current research trends in mobile virtual communities. It classifies Mobile Virtual Communities (MVCs) research into appropriate domains, and categorises the different types of virtual communities with respect to three criteria: the degree of virtualisation, the degree of mobility and the degree of cooperation. It also draws some conclusions on future research dir...

With the availability of the Internet, virtual communities are proliferating at an unprecedented rate. Indepth understanding of virtual community dynamics can help us to address critical organizational and information systems issues such as communities-of-practice, virtual collaboration, and knowledge management. The biggest challenge in fostering a virtual community is the supply of knowledge ...

Contemporary organizations and communities make increasing use of advanced information system and communication technologies to collaborate and interact with each other in geographically and temporally distributed settings. In broad terms, these are referred to as virtual environments. Examples of such virtual environments include virtual work (encompassing telework and distributed work), virtu...