Trust-Building Mechanisms and Knowledge Sharing in Virtual Communities

Although trust has received much intention in the virtual communities (VCs) literature, few studies have been conducted to examine how trust develops in VCs. Drawing from prior literature on trust and knowledge sharing, a research model for understanding the antecedents of trust and the role of trust in VCs is presented. Data was collected from 324 members of a technical virtual community to test the model. The results help in identifying how the factors fall into three trust-building mechanisms build trust in the context VCs. The study discusses the theoretical and managerial implications of this study and proposes several future research directions

Community space in complex learning communities : lessons learnt

Highly complex learning communities where diverse participants collaborate to achieve multiple aims through synergy have the potential to be highly creative and productive. However the diversity and multiple aims can also mean the advantages of a community - share understand, trust and direction - are difficult to achieve, resulting in few if any of the aims being realised. We review two case studies, where the learning community is trying to achieve multiple aims, in order to explore how virtual and physical space are employed to support collaborative learning and enhance synergistic potential. The analysis shows that high levels of diversity have influenced these spaces and trends towards differentiation and holistically designed hybrid, virtual and physical, collaboration space. The characteristics of theses cases are sufficiently general to lead us to draw insights for the building of collaborative space in multi-purpose complex learning communities. These are equably applicable to learning communities which share features such as heterogeneity, multiple locations or a mixture of spaces

How can virtual communities create value for business?

Virtual communities include everything from discussion boards to massive multiplayer online role-playing games and virtual realities such as Second Life. The business world has assumed that virtual communities can be leveraged to provide access to consumers and consumer data. The benefits of this assumption have not always been realized. The purpose of this article is to understand why some business ventures into virtual communities fail and others succeed. Why do virtual communities support certain types of business activities and not others? Which firm activities are the best candidates to benefit from being positioned in virtual communities? The theories of social contracts and trust explain how firms can successfully participate in virtual communities. The theories have implications in the context of transaction-oriented, interest-oriented, relationship-oriented, and fantasy-oriented communities. The value chain provides an instructive background to understand which firm activities are candidates for being included in virtual communities. Success in virtual communities depends on an attitude of contribution, dedication of resources, building a critical mass, and matching community and business needs. Because many social technologies are in the disillusionment stage of the hype cycle, further research in the business use of virtual communities is needed to guide business practices as we move to full adoption

A Social Relational Model for Firm-Hosted Virtual Communities: The Role of Firm Support

Since the ease of participation and the usefulness of information provided by online groups continue to proliferate in the World Wide Web, people increasingly participate in different forms of virtual community (i.e. online forums, bulletin boards, message boards, chat rooms) for their purposes, such as solving problems, building social relationships, sharing passions, developing professionals. Accordingly, an increasing number of companies are now attempting to exploit this phenomenon by hosting and supporting their own online community for commercial and non-commercial purposes, such as building relationships with their customers, getting their feedback, strengthening the brand, and reducing customer service costs by enabling customer-to-customer problem solving (e.g. Wiertz and Ruyter, 2007). Typical examples of these firm-hosted online communities are Dell Community, Lego® Message Boards, Manhattan GMAT Forums, Ford Forums, iPod (Apple) Discussions, etc. The purpose of this study is to examine factors such as consumers\u27 feelings (sense of community, trust) and the host firm\u27s supports that motivate consumers to exhibit their voluntary contributions and continue their membership in a firm-hosted online community. This dissertation conceptualizes a relational social model in which sense of virtual community and virtual community loyalty are hypothesized to influence customer trust in the host firm and customer citizenship performance (loyalty intention to the host firm, voluntary participation, voluntary cooperation), respectively. Three components of the firm\u27s support to the virtual community—support for member communication, content enhancement and recognition for contribution—are theorized to moderate the relationships between sense of virtual community and trust, and between virtual community loyalty and customer citizenship performance. The overall finding that emerges from the dissertation is that customer citizenship performance is impacted by a customer\u27s sense of virtual community, loyalty to the community, and customer trust in the host firm. Of the three firm support variables, only support for member communication moderates the relationship between virtual community loyalty and voluntary participation. The dissertation makes four theoretical and managerial contributions. First, the paper presents an interdisciplinary review of extant literature on firm-hosted virtual communities and builds on it to develop a conceptualization of relationships between customer-customer social outcomes and customer-business relational outcomes. Second, while previous research has predominantly focused on firm support as an antecedent of trust in customer-business dyadic relationships (Porter, 2004), this research investigates the role of firm support as a moderator of social relational relationships. Third, the study extends the notion of relationship marketing to include customer-customer relationships which has been forgotten in the marketing literature (Clark & Martin, 1994). The implication is that the host firm can use customers themselves to build long-term customer relationships, and based on it to maintain and increase the firm\u27s market share. Finally, from a managerial perspective, this study proposes a general framework that can enable companies to better understand some of the key aspects that define and drive loyalty in online communities. Since sense of community is unique to a specific community, this dissertation also illustrates that a virtual community is an inimitable asset which can be used as a strategic tool to build competitive advantage by a firm in an online environment

An Empirical Investigation of Virtual Communities and Trust

In the midst of promising perceived benefits, the electronic commerce (EC) environment entails greater challenges than those posed by conventional trade. In addition to privacy and security concerns, researchers and businesses alike are increasingly aware that the lack of trust for online vendors experienced by consumers constitutes a serious barrier to the widespread adoption and successful proliferation of EC. The process of building trust between consumers and vendors in the online environment thus becomes of paramount importance. This study seeks to examine how online vendors can develop trusting relationships with consumers through the establishment of virtual communities (VCs), fast becoming a notably successful online business model with relationship-enhancing and trust-building capabilities. By integrating multi-disciplinary theories, we propose and empirically validate a model, which proposes that increased levels of involvement in VCs enhances trust building among members and vendors, in turn encouraging greater EC participation in light of lower perceived risks and greater perceived benefits of online transactions. Results indicate that these relationships as proposed in the model are significant. There is empirical support that VCs constitute a successful business model of building trust, reducing perceived risks of purchase, improving customer relationships, reducing search costs, and retaining customers, leading us to conclude that increased involvement in VCs indeed has a positive effect on EC participation

Understanding the impact of privacy concerns and trust on social networking sites: Analysing user intentions towards willingness to share digital identities

Participation in social networking sites (SNS) has dramatically increased in recent years. SNS focus on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. This study examines the experiences of SNS users, and explores how the depth of their experience and knowledge of the Internet, trust and privacy concerns impact upon their individual willingness to share information about their own identity with other users on social networking websites. An acceptance model is proposed that incorporates cognitive, as well as affective, attitudes as primary influencing factors on user attitudes and behaviour which, in turn, are driven by underlying beliefs, perceived levels of privacy and trust, attitudinal experiences and knowledge, as well as a willingness to share. The proposed conceptual model for this study is derived from the literature review and Theory of Planned Behaviour. This model explains how people experience different levels of motivation about sharing knowledge and seeking information from other members which, in turn, leads to a divergence in both intentions and behaviours within virtual communities. The model shows excellent measurement properties and establishes two distinct constructs—specifically, the need for perceived levels of privacy, and the need for established levels of trust within SNS. This study is based on quantitative methodology and uses a structural equation model to test the construction of the model and its hypothesis. The data for this study were collected from a Facebook forum, with a sample size of 155 SNS users. The main theoretical contribution of this study is to provide greater understanding and new insights into privacy concerns and trust, in so far as these factors impact upon SNS users‘ willingness to readily share information regarding their digital identities. Secondly, this study will enrich the existing literature regarding the inter-relationship between the extent of SNS users‘ length and depth of experience as Internet users, as this impact upon their willingness to share identity-based information

A Bayesian belief network computational model of social capital in virtual communities

The notion of social capital (SC) is increasingly used as a framework for describing social issues in terrestrial communities. For more than a decade, researchers use the term to mean the set of trust, institutions, social norms, social networks, and organizations that shape the interactions of actors within a society and that are considered to be useful and assets for communities to prosper both economically and socially. Despite growing popularity of social capital especially, among researchers in the social sciences and the humanities, the concept remains ill-defined and its operation and benefits limited to terrestrial communities. In addition, proponents of social capital often use different approaches to analyze it and each approach has its own limitations. This thesis examines social capital within the context of technology-mediated communities (also known as virtual communities) communities. It presents a computational model of social capital, which serves as a first step in the direction of understanding, formalizing, computing and discussing social capital in virtual communities. The thesis employs an eclectic set of approaches and procedures to explore, analyze, understand and model social capital in two types of virtual communities: virtual learning communities (VLCs) and distributed communities of practice (DCoP). There is an intentional flow to the analysis and the combination of methods described in the thesis. The analysis includes understanding what constitutes social capital in the literature, identifying and isolating variables that are relevant to the context of virtual communities, conducting a series of studies to further empirically examine various components of social capital identified in three kinds of virtual communities and building a computational model. A sensitivity analysis aimed at examining the statistical variability of the individual variables in the model and their effects on the overall level of social capital are conducted and a series of evidence-based scenarios are developed to test and update the model. The result of the model predictions are then used as input to construct a final empirical study aimed at verifying the model.Key findings from the various studies in the thesis indicated that SC is a multi-layered, multivariate, multidimensional, imprecise and ill-defined construct that has emerged from a rather murky swamp of terminology but it is still useful for exploring and understanding social networking issues that can possibly influence our understanding of collaboration and learning in virtual communities. Further, the model predictions and sensitivity analysis suggested that variables such as trust, different forms of awareness, social protocols and the type of the virtual community are all important in discussion of SC in virtual communities but each variable has different level of sensitivity to social capital. The major contributions of the thesis are the detailed exploration of social capital in virtual communities and the use of an integrated set of approaches in studying and modelling it. Further, the Bayesian Belief Network approach applied in the thesis can be extended to model other similar complex online social systems

Trust: The Enabler of Knowledge-sharing Culture in an Informal Setting

Trust in an organization has been perceived as one of the key factors behind knowledge sharing mainly in an unstructured work environment. The study developed a framework for building trust in knowledge sharing in a virtual environment. The artifact called KAPE (Knowledge Acquisition, Processing, and Exchange) was developed to facilitate knowledge sharing using a web-based platform for Cassava farmers. A survey was conducted, data were collected from 382 farmers from 21 farming communities. Multiple regression techniques, Cronbach’s Alpha reliability test; Tukey’s Honestly significant difference (HSD) analysis; one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and trust acceptable measures (TAM) were used to test the hypotheses. The results show a significant difference when there is trust in knowledge sharing between farmers, those who have high trust levels of trust were differed in the model (M = 3.66 SD = .93) from with low trust acceptable values (M = 2.08 SD = .28), (t (48) = 5.69, p = .00). Furthermore, using the Cognitive Expectancy Theory showed that farmers with cognitive-consonance exhibited a higher level of trust and satisfaction with knowledge and information from KAPE, as compared with a low level of Cognitive-dissonance. These results imply that the adopted trust model (KAPE) shows a positive improvement in knowledge sharing activities in an informal environment amongst rural farmers

Engaging Stakeholder Networks to Support Global OA Monograph Usage Analytics

Just as COVID-19 brought in-person meetings to a halt, the Open Access eBook Usage (OAeBU) Data Trust transitioned from a two-year stakeholder planning project to a two-year global pilot tasked with developing infrastructure use-cases, software code, sustainability models, and governance mechanisms to better enable the usage and impact analyses of OA monographs. This report introduces the array of stakeholders involved in OA book analytics and summarizes how this data trust effort worked to engage them during the first third of the project. Virtual network building and engagement strategies such as online stakeholder-oriented communities and collaboration tools are discussed alongside traditional strategies like interviews and proof of concept partnerships. The report concludes with observations made to date as the team explores whether a global usage data trust can meet the needs of OA monograph creators, editors, publishers, publishing service providers, libraries and sponsors