Prior work has identified, in piecemeal fashion, desirable characteristics of Virtual Community businesses (VCBs) such as inimitable information assets, persistent handles fomenting trust, and an economic infrastructure. The present work develops a framework for the success of a subscription-based VCB by taking into account the above elements and considering as well an interplay of the membership (both regular members and volunteers), technical features of the interface, and an evolutionary business model that supports member subgroups as they form. Our framework is applied by an in-depth survey of use and attitude of regular members and volunteers in the Internet Chess Club (ICC), a popular subscription-based VCB.. The survey results reveal that key features of the model are supported in the ICC case: member subgroups follow customized communication pathways; a corps of volunteers is supported and recognized, and the custom interface presents clear navigation pathways to the ICC’s key large-scale information asset, a multi-million game database contributed by real-world chess Grandmasters who enjoy complimentary ICC membership. We conclude by discussing VCBs in general and how the framework might apply to other domains.

Professional associations could use virtual communities to reinvent their relationships with their members. One promising building block would be to revitalise Special Interest Groups as loose knit Internet based communities. These would be what has been called “networks of practice ” or “communities of interest”. Although recognised phenomena, these terms are little more than labels, however. Far more has been written about the rich, close knit relations of communities of practice. This paper argues that as a model the community of practice concept is useful in defining dimensions by which such looser knit groups can be studied. To this end, community of practice theory is reviewed. The paper then presents a case study of an informal community among web developers. It uses genre analysis to identify a dominant discourse which constitutes the list’s local culture or repertoire. The genres in use are very efficient means of exchanging information, offering broad learning opportunities. They also construct a member identity. They exclude social and political issues, constructing “the problem ” of the web as technical. The “network ” has a sense of community, yet it does not have the level of engagement of a community of practice because of the lack of task interdependence, the limits of the technology in use and the size of membership. This has some advantages such as giving it a longer life, requiring less commitment from members and coordinators and making it scale to numbers in a professional association. Professional associations could build up from such networks of practice, just as corporations have sought to cultivate spontaneous informal groups, to manage knowledge. 1.

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

This study draws upon self-verification theory, social identity theory and self-categorization theory to investigate the dual effects of system design, i.e., identity confirmation (the self) and identification (the community), on virtual community (VC) participation. An important theoretical development is the conceptualization of VC identity and the elucidation of its system design determinants. Community presentation, i.e., system design features for presenting a virtual community identity, is hypothesized to facilitate identification by setting the boundaries for inter-group comparison and highlighting the in-group homogeneity. Furthermore, system design features that prior research identified as determinants for identity confirmation, i.e., self-presentation, deep profiling, and co-presence, are argued to have impacts on identification directly by influencing social comparison and indirectly by making the VC identity attractive. The research model accounts for the dual roles of system design features, i.e., effects on identification and identity confirmation, in explaining VC participation. The implications of these results for both theory and practice are discussed.