Key ideas

Notes from P2PU discussion

Survey + statistics from 71 Korean communities to find success factors. Offline meetings leads to increase in posting, usefulness leads to increase in reading. Moderator has no effect.

Definition: the degree to which the medium facilitates awareness of other people and interpersonal relationships during an interaction

Critical for effective communications in many social/work contexts.

Textual information prevalent, but low social presence - needs support with graphical, textual or video interfaces.

Require

• clear purpose or vision
• clear definition of members' role
  • for example based on life cycle, visitor, novice, regular etc
• leadership by community moderators
  • play an important role in developing social climate, critical success factor for sustainability of any virtual community.
  • who face challenge of dealing with heterogenity of members: age, education, profession
• online/offline events
  • strengthen members' identification within community, and with one another
  • to amplify this, encourage community members to remember physical appearance of other members or help them match real names with nicknames, etc.
  • can also be replaced with multimedia support, camera chatting etc

Other perspective, requires:

• clear vision
• opinion leaders
• offline interaction
• basic guidelines
• useful content

Factors that stimulate participants' posting and viewing of community content

Which of four following factors stimulate virtual community:

• leader involvement
• offline interaction
• usefulness
• IT infrastructure quality

77 virtual communities in Korea on Freechal.com, which has half a million virtual communities. Used survey, as well as archival data to measure community size, age, and average monthly level.

Posting activity influenced by offline interaction

Viewing activity affected by perceived usefulness

The fact that these two are influenced by different factors is a key finding.

Contrary to expectations, efforts of community leaders not directly associated with either.

Could be because of collectivist and long-term orientation of Korean culture (explain effect of offline interaction), while perceptions of power distance and strong sense of equity explain insignificant effect of leader involvement.