Abstract
A hard challenge facing developers of online communities is attaining a critical mass of members and subsequently sustaining their participation. We propose a new mechanism for motivating participation in interest-based online communities, which engages non-contributing members (lurkers) by modeling and visualizing the asymmetrical relations formed when reading, evaluating, or commenting other community members’ contributions. The mechanism is based on ideas from open user modeling, a new concept of “community energy,” with a mechanism of rating contributions and visualizing the rank of contributions in the community interface.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Preece, J.: Sociability and usability in online communities: determining and measuring success. Behaviour & Information Technology 20(5), 347–356 (2001)
Maloney-Krichmar, D., Preece, J.: A multilevel analysis of sociability, usability, and community dynamics in an online health community. ACM Trans. Comput. -Hum. Interact 12(2), 201–232 (2005)
Michele Boyd, D.: Friendster and publicly articulated social networking. In: CHI 2004 extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems Vienna, Austria, pp. 1279–1282. ACM Press, New York (2004)
Johnson, C.M.: A survey of current research on online communities of practice. The Internet and Higher Education 4(1), 45–60 (2001)
Wellman, B., Salaff, J., Dimitrova, D., Garton, L., Gulia, M., Haythornthwaite, C.: Computer networks as social networks: Collaborative work, telework, and virtual community. Annual Review of Sociology 22, 213–238 (1996)
Nonnecke, B., Preece, J.: Lurker demographics: counting the silent. In: CHI 2000 Conference Proceedings. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI 2000. The Future is Here, pp. 73–80. ACM, The Hague (2000)
Rheingold, H.: The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., Reading (1993)
Smith, M., Kollock, P.: Communities in Cyberspace. Routledge, London (1999)
Preece, J., Nonnecke, B., Andrews, D.: The top five reasons for lurking: improving community experiences for everyone. Computers in Human Behavior 20(2), 201–223 (2004)
Takahashi, M., Fujimoto, M., Yamasaki, N.: The active lurker: influence of an in-house online community on its outside environment. In: Proceedings of the 2003 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work Sanibel Island, Florida, USA, pp. 1–10. ACM Press, New York (2003)
Preece, J., Maloney-Krichmar, D.: Online communities: focusing on sociability and usability, pp. 596–620. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Mahwah (2003)
Grudin, J.: Groupware and social dynamics: eight challenges for developers. Communications of the Acm 37(1), 92–105 (1994)
Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology: Group Processes. Malden. Blackwell Publishers, Massachusetts (2001)
Kraut, R.E.: Applying Social Psychology Theory to the Problems of Group Work. In: Carrol, J.M. (ed.) HCI Models, Theories and Frameworks: Toward a Multidisciplinary Science, pp. 325–356. Morgan Kaufmann, New York (2003)
Beenen, G., Ling, K., Wang, X., Chang, K., Frankowski, D., Resnick, P., Kraut, R.E.: Using social psychology to motivate contributions to online communities. In: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work Chicago, Illinois, USA, pp. 212–221. ACM Press, New York (2004)
Dholakia, U.M., Bagozzi, R.P., Pearo, L.K.: A social influence model of consumer participation in network- and small-group-based virtual communities. International Journal of Research in Marketing 21(3), 241–263 (2004)
Cheng, R., Vassileva, J.: Adaptive Incentive Mechanism for Sustainable Online Community, pp. 152–159. IOS Press, Amsterdam (2005)
Bull, S., Brna, P., Dimitrova, V.: LeMoRe (2006), http://www.eee.bham.ac.uk/bull/lemore/
Granovetter, M.: The Strength of Weak Ties. Current Contents/Social & Behavioral Sciences 49, 24 (1986)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Webster, A., Vassileva, J. (2006). Visualizing Personal Relations in Online Communities. In: Wade, V.P., Ashman, H., Smyth, B. (eds) Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems. AH 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4018. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11768012_24
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11768012_24
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-34696-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-34697-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)