What influences the decision to participate in audience-bounded online communities?

López, Claudia; Farzan, Rosta; Sahebi, Shaghayegh; Brusilovsky, Peter

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/39334 Copy

Description

Title

What influences the decision to participate in audience-bounded online communities?

Author(s)

• López, Claudia
• Farzan, Rosta
• Sahebi, Shaghayegh
• Brusilovsky, Peter

Issue Date

2013-02

Keyword(s)

• social computing
• social and community informatics
• audience-bounded online communities
• offline structure
• participation

Abstract

Building online communities to support small, audience-bounded offline social structures such as neighborhoods or organizations can be challenging. Due to the small size of their potential audience, the contribution volume is likely to be insufficient to maintain a sustainable community-driven system. In our research, we are interested in studying how different characteristics of the offline structure of these communities can influence their online behavior. Particularly, we analyzed participation of researchers in a social system for conferences. Our analysis shows that centrality in the academic social structure is a significant predictor of the likelihood to accept an invitation to participate in the system. These results suggest that an understanding of the users’ offline context can increase the effectiveness of user engagement strategies in an online context.

Publisher

iSchools

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/39334

DOI

https://doi.org/10.9776/13262

Copyright and License Information

Copyright © 2013 is held by the authors. Copyright permissions, when appropriate, must be obtained directly from the authors.

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