Community feedback is likely to perpetuate undesired member behavior

The feedback of other community members is considered to be an important corrective factor in moderating community discussions. Liking a post, voting on a comment, rating are the most common feedback mechanisms. Theoretically, feedback would lead users to behave in ways that benefit the community.

Successfull Managment of Online Health Communities

Browsing the Internet, I stumbled across these three interesting articles about the successful management of online health communities. Here are the (slightly modified) abstracts:

Virtual Communities of Practice - Start-up and Cultivation

Since the early 90s, Jean Lave's and Etienne Wenger's concept of communities of practice [1] has produced a huge amount of scholarly and more popular literature, first as a theory of learning and later in the field of knowledge management. In the advent of the digital era, communities of practice are not just organized as face-to-face communities but as virtual communities as well and so Wenger et al. [2] re-conceptualized communities of practice for digital environments.

(Dis-)satisfaction with the online community - Herzberg’s two factors theory in a community context

Intuitively, one would say that satisfaction and dissatisfaction are like two poles on the same continuum. But that is not necessarily so. In the context of job satisfaction and job performance Herzberg developed his two factors theory and showed that there is a set of factors that causes satisfaction (motivators) and another one that causes dissatisfaction (hygiene factors) when absent. [1]. The practical implication is that to improve job attitudes and productivity, administrators must recognize and attend to both sets. The question is whether this theory can be applied to satisfaction with an online community and participation in community life as well.

Social information behaviour as a Driver of Online Communities

The need for information is one of the reasons why people participate in communities and information exchange (like giving and receiving support) is a social phenomenon. But very often, seekers of information are seen as individuals and the focus in many studies lies on individual information behaviour - omitting socials aspect. Reddy & Jansen [1], on the other hand, argue that more emphasis should be put on these social aspects in information behaviour, that is why they investigate the driving forces that lie behind social information

Why People Participate in Online Communities

Why do people hang out online and what motivates them to participate in online communities? There are two very interesting studies that provide some insight into the answers of these questions.(continue reading on The Community Manager)

Social Presence, Social Identity and Participation in Online Communities

In an empirical study from 2006, Shen et al. [1] combined two important concepts - social presence and social identity - in order to investigate their effect on community participation. The structural model revealed that social presence is a decisive factor in creating social identity and that the influence of social presence and social identity on participation is bigger than the fulfillment of information needs (one of the primary reasons why people join a community).