Life-long learning is a key issue for our knowledge society. With social software systems new heterogeneous kinds of technology enhanced informal learning are now available to the life-long learner. Learners outside of learning institutions now have access to powerful social communities of experts and peers who are together forging a new web 2.0. This paper reviews current work in pan-European initiatives that impact upon life-long learning via views of professional learning, learner competence and social networking. It seeks to provide an overview of some of the critical research questions for the interdisciplinary field of social software research.

The Internet has spurred a phenomenal growth of virtual communities (VC). VCs can range from simple information exchange based forums to more complex networks supporting new product development. For example, communities of interest based forums such as investment-related Virtual Communities bring together individuals interested in exchanging information about stocks while online production communities such as open source development communities focus on developing a new product. This Mini-track is designed to focus on issues relevant to the design, management and impact of VCs. It attracted several good submissions addressing many relevant issues for theory development and practice. In this paper, we summarize the accepted papers for the Virtual Communities track and outline areas for future research.

Virtual communities enable people with common interests to interact with each other. Until today, research has mostly focused on the aspects of social interaction, usability and success factors for virtual communities. But due to the link between effective coordination of management teams and success of virtual communities, virtual community management becomes of great importance for both research and practice. Therefore, the imperative of this research is to develop an understanding of what drives management teams of successful virtual communities. Drawing on existing literature, we identify relevant theories and use a previous exploratory case study in order to provide a theoretical explanation of the variables and factors that affect the success of virtual community management teams. Furthermore, we provide first suggestions for measurement instruments in order to subsequently test our proposed model using empirical, quantitative methods.

This paper describes the enduring dichotomy between what is defined as science and what is defined as non-science, and shows how this dichotomy serves as a backdrop for current divisions between theory and practice. The canonical concept of invention and contemporary interest in problem setting highlight the similarities between the activities of theoreticians and practitioners and inform the development of a useful definition of rhetorical or communication design. While recent developments in activity-, work-, and ecologically-centered design provide a powerful metaphor for contextualizing communication design work, a tentative argument is made for attending to emerging opportunities and challenges related to distributed space and time.

The first national IT-summit in Germany had the goal to communicate the common conviction and objective target of the German government as well as economic and scientific organizations that Germany is on its way to become the ICT-market number one worldwide. Critiques however soon started to complain about the inaccurate representation of SME’s and the German public in general in the planning phase, the event itself, and the follow up process of the IT-summit. The offline community of the IT-summit was migrated into a virtual online counterpart – the “IT-summit-blog ” weblog. The purpose of this approach was to improve the efficiency and ability to support the sharing of information and knowledge in a very timely fashion about summit topics even among all those that could not participate in the discussion yet. The collective knowledge generated out of this “think tank ” is used by reintegrating and using it in the follow-up-process as regards content of the summit. The case at hand identifies the success factors needed to develop such a virtual communication platform. The discussion is underplayed with a theoretical debate about the conceptual foundations concerning virtual communities in general, and weblogs specifically. This discussion shows that no virtual community is like another. Modern communication platforms need to be tailored towards the specific

At any given time, at least 2.4 million couples are planning their weddings. Couples get advice from loved ones, articles, television, and the Internet to plan their weddings. The Knot, an online wedding planning resource, helps couples plan their weddings with personalized online web-pages called bios. The amount of information varies in each bio, however some bios have enough information to help malicious third parties create phishing schemes, identity thefts, cancellation problems, and robberies. This paper presents a statistical analysis of privacy concerns for Knot members using Web 2.0 technologies to brag about their weddings.

This paper proposes a conceptual model of the key factors that drive employees ’ effective participation with social tagging systems within the corporate environment. The proposed model is based on integrating and applying existing findings from various disciplines in a novel conceptualization to explain the motivations of participants in organizational social tagging systems.

Research Article The chief objective in many online communities is to allow for knowledge sharing and learning, which is enabled by technologies such as discussion forums. The value realized from these communities depends on ongoing participation in terms of two key activities i.e., knowledge seeking and contribution. However, a large number of communities fail, as they cannot sustain these activities. This poses the question of how these two activities can be simultaneously promoted. While previous research has separately explicated a number of different antecedents for the two activities, this study adopts a socio-technical perspective of an online community and considers usability and sociability as two salient antecedents applicable to both activities. Usability and sociability are multi-dimensional constructs, where individual’s perceptions of the two may be determined by dimensions such as ease of use and social interactivity. This paper proposes that individuals may place different importance on these dimensions when seeking knowledge, compared to contributing knowledge. The research model is tested through a survey of users of a learning-focused community system. Our findings indicate that individuals do, indeed, differ in their emphasis on the identified dimensions when they engage in the two activities. Specifically, ease of use and system reliability are considered as more important for usability, and moderator perception as more important for sociability when individuals seek knowledge. On the other hand, individuals perceive tracking fulfillment as more important for usability and social interactivity as more important for

Online production systems represent a new and innovative approach for producing information goods. However, the success of such endeavors depends on a careful interrelationship between their social and technical dimensions. In this paper, we explore how various aspects of those dimensions impact the success of online production systems. We collected data from the open source community GNOME and we used the inclusion of a product into an official release as indicator for the success of a project. Our analyses revealed that structural characteristics of the individual project’s communication and task dependency (coordination needs) networks, the position of individuals in the overall ecosystem communication network as well as the technical structure of the product, are all significantly associated with project success. Our novel results represent an important step in understanding the success drivers of online production systems as well as a starting point for reshaping traditional models for producing information goods typically used in corporate settings.

question and answer (Q&A), market mechanisms, incentives, motivation, social relationship theory, information overload, spam, interruption, human attention. Requesting and sharing information through computer-mediated technology is an integral part of our lives in this information age. However, when deciding whether or not and how to engage in information exchanges, parties involved often have different needs and constraints. In addition, they are often unaware of each others ’ needs and constraints. Such asymmetry in motivation and information leads to suboptimal allocation of attention and time and contributes to the growing problems of information overload, costly interruptions and missed opportunities. A potential solution is to employ market mechanisms to support information exchange. Markets are institutions that allow individuals to trade goods and services efficiently. Applying markets to information exchange, askers can use pricing to signal the importance of the information exchange and compensate the answerers for their time. Answerers can use pricing mechanisms to filter incoming requests, reducing interruption costs and information overload. This dissertation studies the strengths and weaknesses of using economic markets for interpersonal information exchange. Are there costs in incorporating markets into our everyday information exchanges?