www.ifsm.umbc.edu/onlinecommunities Little attention has focused so far on evaluating the success of online communities. This paper starts to identify some key determinants of sociability and usability that help to determine their success. Determinants of sociability include obvious measures such as the number of participants in a community, the number of messages per unit of time, members ’ satisfaction, and some less obvious measures such as amount of reciprocity, the number of on-topic messages, trustworthiness and several others. Measures of usability include numbers of errors, productivity, user satisfaction and others. The list is not exhaustive but it is intended to provide a starting point for research on this important topic that will lead to develop of metrics. To avoid creating false impressions it is advisable to use several measures and to triangulate with qualitative data, particularly from ethnographic studies. 1

The aim of this research is to develop an in-depth understanding of the dynamics of online group interaction and the relationship between the participation in an online community and an individual’s off-line life. The 21 /2-year study of a thriving online health support community (Bob’s ACL WWWBoard) used a broad fieldwork approach, guided by the ethnographic research techniques of observation, interviewing, and archival research in combination with analysis of the group’s dynamics during a one-week period. Research tools from the social sciences were used to develop a thick, rich description of the group. The significant findings of this study include: dependable and reliable technology is more important than state-of-the-art technology in this community; strong community development exists despite little differentiation of the community space provided by the software; members reported that participation in the community positively influenced their offline lives; strong group norms of support and reciprocity made externally-driven governance unnecessary; tools used to assess group dynamics in face-to-face groups provide meaningful information about online group dynamics; and, membership patterns in the community and strong subgroups actively contributed to the community’s stability and vitality.

E-commerce strategists advise companies to create virtual communities for their customers. But what is involved in establishing and maintaining virtual communities? This paper addresses two questions: Does a sense of community similar to that sometimes observed in physical communities also occur in virtual settings? And how is a sense of virtual community maintained? These questions are examined in an intensive study of an established virtual community called MSN. MSN members experienced a sense of community, but the dimensions of sense of community differed somewhat from those reported for physical communities in ways plausibly related to the differences between electronic and face-toface communication. The experienced sense of community in MSN was actively maintained through the social processes of exchanging support, creating identities and making identifications, and the production of trust. Again, these processes are similar to those in non-virtual communities, but related to the challenges of electronic communication. The findings suggest a process model of sense of virtual community creation and maintenance that is simpler and more powerful than previous theories.

As e-commerce and virtual communities fundamentally change the way Americans do business and build relationships, how can people be assured of safety in unfamiliar cyber-spaces? This essay focuses on online auction eBay to understand how eBay has successfully drawn millions of users to its site in spite of perceived risks and uncertainties. It argues that eBay is, in fact, a community (of commerce), and that the rhetorical construction of “community” on the site provides a foundation for trust between users. Based on trust theory, this essay isolates eBay’s “community trust” model as consisting of seven elements that work together to give users reasons to trust and to be trustworthy. Finally, the essay examines recent changes to eBay’s system, suggesting that so-called improvements for control might actually weaken the “community trust” system already in place—a warning to other sites that might imitate eBay’s community approach.

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This article presents a model for Internet portal management. The model allows portal implementers to monitor and reflect on their portal implementation process and to identify appropriate strategies to improve their community building efforts. The portal management model (PMM) is a lifecycle model that contains four stages. Each stage is identified and described by a number of characteristics and an associated existential crisis. Each crisis must be addressed for the portal to remain in business but it must be overcome to move on to the next- more advanced - stage. Four competitive strategies are presented as effective for steering the portal through each of the stages. At the initial stage, the new portal should seek to be the unavoidable pesky little brother and seek to imitate the older established portals. At the second stage the appropriate strategy is for the portal to gain strength through marriage rather than staying single - called the battle of the sexes strategy. At the third stage it is time to take firm control over the portal community. Here open confrontation is unavoidable as in the fairytale of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. At the fourth and final stage, the established portal must ceaselessly monitor the market for new contestants and counter them.

The literature contains many examples of utopian predictions stemming from the widespread adoption of Internet technology, including extended democracy, personal liberation, enhanced powers of organization and coordination, and renewal of community. These are briefly described in this paper. However, more recently, researchers have begun to provide more critical, dystopian predictions for this technology, and these accounts are also summarised in the paper. Interestingly, researchers have tended to consider the utopian and dystopian outcomes as mutually exclusive, i.e., there is a tendencey to present extreme accounts which are entirely utopian or dystopian. It is suggested that both the utopian and dystopian visions are fundamentally flawed, in so far as they are founded on a predominantly technologically-determistic view. The paper draws on a comprehensive field study of the phenomenon in practice to illustrate that the Internet has the propensity to result in both utopian and dystopian outcomes. Thus, a central argument presented is that both utopian and dystopian outcomes can occur simultaneously, albeit in relation to different factors. The paper proposes a framework which illustrates the factors which influence the manner in which utopian and dystopian outcomes result.

Virtual Communities are presented as major components of an e-Learning environment. We discuss the charcteristics of Virtual Communities both from a sociological and an educational point of view. Wethenlook at the design and development considerations in forming e-learning communities. In particular, we look at communityware and other technologies usefull for collaborative learning. Finally, we conclude that virtual communities are emerging not only to be the social support system of the digitally connected future, but also as the more popular mode of learning support. Keywords e-learning, virtual communities 1 VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES The term virtual community refers to a group of people who share some common ideas, interests, feelings and space over the Internet or over some other communication network. A virtual community maybean electronic forum for information exchange, social interaction, and psychological reinforcement. In a virtual community, members communicate using the ele...

Clinical psychologists have traditionally shied away from technology, perhaps because many of the therapeutic elements of psychotherapy rely on verbal and nonverbal interpersonal communication. Although nothing will ever replace face-to-face communication as the key element of psychological practice, the advance of technology is now offering new communication tools that psychologist and their patients feel comfortable using for clinical care.

Online learning communities may greatly benefit from incorporating adaptive features which take advantage of the knowledge and experiences of community members and use it to better serve each individual depending on personal preferences, goals and needs, as well as the history of activity in the community. This paper investigates the incorporation of adaptive features in online learning communities and focuses on deploying web mining techniques for this purpose. It presents a pilot system that experiments with the application of a number of adaptation forms and concludes with identifying some open issues and concerns in the domain of applying adaptiveness to web environments that host learning communities.