The Role of Imaginaries in the Governance of Online Communities of Creation:A Netnographic Study

Online communities (OCs) of creation are powerful innovation sources that that are highly valued by private sector organizations and have prompted the adoption of various governance models. However, OCs lacking corporate sponsorship also arise spontaneously on social media to address pressing societal problems. These independently forming, evolving, and self-organizing entities are capable of engendering innovative solutions to such problems. Our study empirically investigates the interplay between governance and innovation in such online communities of creation by employing an immersive netnography, focussed on a long-standing urban planning controversy, the so-called ‘Big Worm’ in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Our findings show how imaginaries related to this controversy played a crucial role in the spontaneous formation of online communities of creation, fostering solution development, and helping to guide self-organized interactions based on community creativity. Our study underscores the role of imaginaries in self-organization, contrasting this with firm-sponsored governance models. We conclude that imaginaries enable unsponsored communities of creation to demonstrate the ability to self-organize and generate innovative solutions, contributing to both the private sector and civil society outcomes

(Re-)Valuing and Co-Creating Cultures of Water: a transdisciplinary methodology for weaving a live tapestry of Blue Heritage

This article develops a transdisciplinary methodology for valuing and cocreating ‘tapestries’ of Blue Heritage. Given impending threats to the environmental sustainability and maintenance of Cultural Heritage surrounding oceans and freshwaters, it is increasingly urgent to develop a methodology that addresses the significance of the past and its rapport with the continuous future creation and valuing of what we here develop as ‘Cultures of Water’. This idea encompasses water-related practices that occur in various ways across diverse groups and arenas. Therefore, the proposed methodology is informed by several disciplines, notably History, Ethnography, Cultural Heritage, Arts, Design, Planning, and Geography. It emphasises the creation of a continuously evolving and changing tapestry of knowledge, jointly threaded by local populations, governmental and non-governmental institutions at various levels, industries, businesses, and academia. The tapestry is woven by connecting diverse disciplinary methodologies along specific threads, three on content and six on methods and related key questions. This article presents the methodology and reflects on its practicability and potential based on autoethnographic reflections, literature reviews, and first findings from implementing parts of the methodology in northern Portugal