Toward the future: A conceptual review and call for research and action with online communities

The internet allows people to connect with virtually anyone across the globe, building communities based on shared interests, experiences, and goals. Despite the potential for furthering our understanding of communities more generally through exploring them in online contexts, online communities have not generally been a focus of community psychologists. A conceptual, state-of-the-art review of eight major community psychology journals revealed 23 descriptive or empirical articles concerning online communities have been published in the past 20 years. These articles are primarily descriptive and can be organized into four categories: community building and maintenance (seven articles, 30.43%), community support (six articles, 26.09%), norms and attitudes (six articles, 26.09%), and advocacy (four articles, 17.39%). These articles reflect a promising start to understanding how we can utilize the internet to build and enhance communities. They also indicate how much further we have to go, both in understanding online communities and certain concepts regarding community psychology more generally. Community psychologists involved in practice and applied settings specifically may benefit from understanding online communities as they become integral components of advocacy, community organizing, and everyday life

Toward the future: A conceptual review and call for research and action with online communities

The internet allows people to connect with virtually anyone across the globe, building communities based on shared interests, experiences, and goals. Despite the potential for furthering our understanding of communities more generally through exploring them in online contexts, online communities have not generally been a focus of community psychologists. A conceptual, state-of-the-art review of eight major community psychology journals revealed 23 descriptive or empirical articles concerning online communities have been published in the past 20 years. These articles are primarily descriptive and can be organized into four categories: community building and maintenance (seven articles, 30.43%), community support (six articles, 26.09%), norms and attitudes (six articles, 26.09%), and advocacy (four articles, 17.39%). These articles reflect a promising start to understanding how we can utilize the internet to build and enhance communities. They also indicate how much further we have to go, both in understanding online communities and certain concepts regarding community psychology more generally. Community psychologists involved in practice and applied settings specifically may benefit from understanding online communities as they become integral components of advocacy, community organizing, and everyday life

Design principles for transforming making programs into online settings at public libraries

Purpose This paper aims to investigate design principles for transforming existing making communities of practice within public libraries into online knowledge-building communities to support youths, families with young children and adult members’ making and tinkering during COVID-19. Design/methodology/approach Building upon C4P and connected learning framework, the authors analyze existing literature and practitioner reports on informal learning projects related to making and STEM learning, family learning and online learning as well as emergent cases of innovative approaches in response to COVID-19 from public libraries, informal learning institutions and community groups. Findings The authors suggest 11 design principles around five areas: program design, facilitation, tools and materials, process documentation and sharing and feedback. Originality/value This work contributes to the information and learning sciences concerned with community engagement and knowledge creation by suggesting a design model to transform and sustain existing making communities of practice within public libraries into online knowledge-building communities during COVID-19

Knowledge Sharing in Online Cancer Survivorship Community System: A Theoretical Framework

Innovative uses of technology to support patient to patient or patient to clinician knowledge sharing are emerging through professional health institutions and communities that take advantage of social networking technologies. Although successful online health communities exist, many such communities do fail. Researchers have stated that the reason for these failures is due to the lack of evidence-based, scientific guidance in building and managing online communities. Knowledge sharing among participants is important for the survival of online health communities. The most difficult and challenging task for online health communities is to understand why certain participants share knowledge in a sustained manner while others do not. The purpose of this study is to identify the conditions that will predict and prescribe a successful online health community. We propose a theoretical model that presents computer self-efficacy, system capabilities, patient characteristics, appropriation support as determinants of knowledge sharing. We also propose that knowledge sharing affects satisfaction, and frequent usage of online health community networks within online cancer survivorship community

Evaluative Language and Its Solidarity-Building Role on TED.com: An Appraisal and Corpus Analysis

Language is a key resource in the formation of online communities, which are in turn central to an understanding of contemporary social relations. This study looks at TED.com, an educational video-hosting platform with few in-built community-building functionalities, to explore the potential for users to affiliate through their language choices. Grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics, the study uses the Appraisal framework, extended using corpus linguistic methods, in order to analyse users’ reactions to TED videos. The study shows that online participants use evaluative language to align with certain ideas and, based on these affinities, form affiliations characterized by sociability and solidarity. These affiliations raise important questions about the conception of ‘community’ in twenty-first century society

Facilitating online interaction using community building strategies

Online learning communities provide a solution to the lack of opportunities for teacher and peer interaction and engagement when students study remotely. However, creating the intangible essences that make online learning communities effective, such as a sense of connectedness and a feeling of belonging, can be challenging. This paper describes a pilot online learning community to demonstrate the effectiveness of carefully facilitated activities during each stage of implementation. Student responses support claims of increased interaction while unit completion rates present a strong case for the merits of designing and facilitating online learning using a community building approach

Virtual Community Design, Participation and Success: A Strategy-as-Practice perspective

With increasing participation and interaction in online communities, creators and participants in these communities are interested in enhancing the interactions, promoting ongoing interest and building a sense of community. These outcomes involve developing and implementing strategies which will achieve the desired objectives. Given interest in the strategy and governance mechanisms in virtual communities, in this paper, we examine ongoing strategizing of the stakeholders of an online community, through a strategy-as-practice perspective using a qualitative approach of content analysis. This longitudinal perspective, over a period of nine years, provides insight into the strategy praxis, practitioners and practices related to strategizing for the ongoing development of this online community. Stakeholders negotiate strategies which seek to provide preferred interaction modalities given the support or constraints of the IT-enabled environment

BUILDING AND SUSTAINING COMMUNITIES IN ONLINE LABOUR PLATFORMS

Online labour platforms enable the trading of services by connecting buyers who need services with providers willing to deliver those services. One crucial element to a platform’s survival and success lies in creating and fostering a thriving community of users – otherwise, the platform is likely to perish. However, we know very little about how such communities can be built. Extant studies have overlooked different stakeholder groups’ roles in community building and how primarily online platforms utilize offline activities. In this paper, we study the community-building efforts of six online labour platforms that have succeeded to thrive longer than an average platform. Beyond the traditional stakeholder roles of providing a marketplace (platform), delivering services (providers) and purchasing services (buyers), we find novel unique and shared roles that foster a well-functioning community. We identify five levers of community building: facilitating trade, encouraging community participation, involving users, empowering providers, and empowering buyers

USER CONTRIBUTION IN ONLINE COMMUNITIES - THE INFLUENCE OF ADVERTISING ON THE EFFECTIVENESS OF SOCIAL NORMATIVE FEEDBACK

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 leverage advertising as a source of revenue. A potential means to compensate negative participation effects and foster contribution is social normative feedback being known as one of the most powerful levers of behavioral change. However, we want to challenge the power of this instrument in the context of communities building upon advertising and propose a respective field experiment with 600 participants. Our findings will be important for the design of online communities considering or relying on advertising as a source of revenue