- Support communities
- Customer (brand) communities
- Coaching communities
- Event communities
- Action communities
- Circumstances communities
- Social communities
- Learning communities
- Networking communities
- Review communities

Types of online communities

- Encouraging commitment
- Encouraging contribution 
- Regulating behavior of its members
- Attracting and maintaining new members
- Maintaining the critical mass of users and content

Factors of a Successful Online Community

Online Communities References

Online communities can be built on a variety of technology platforms, such as email lists, forums, blogs, wikis, and social networking sites.

Where are online communities?

The defining characteristic of online communities is the ongoing interactions among people over time, some of which are facilitated by technology.

Online communities' common feature

Online communities serve a similar purpose as offline groups, networks and communities by providing opportunities for:
- Information sharing and learning
- Companionship and social support
- Entertainment
- Remote work

They can also generate benefits for people outside the community, such as **public goods** like:
- Open-source software
- Product reviews
- Encyclopedia pages

A **private goods** like:
- Suggestions for product improvements
- New product designs

for the organization that created the community.

Benefits of online communities

An "online community" (AKA internet community or web community) refers to any virtual environment where individuals gather to communicate, share information or resources, learn, play or spend time with one another. This term can be used to describe various social configurations, from small tight-knit groups to sites with millions of members.

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Albion College

New York University

- Knowledge sharing
- Social technologies
- Collaboratories
- Online communities
- Knowledge management

Focuses of CSCW

Wikipedia

Kraut, Robert E., and Paul Resnick. Building successful online communities: Evidence-based social design. MIT Press, 2012.

Building successful online communities: Evidence-based social design (Kraut and Resnick)

Knowledge being exchanged between people (or groups of). Includes the exchange of expertise, skills, and information.

Knowledge Sharing

A way of using digital, and technical resources in order to shape the human social experience

Social Technologies

- Originally defined by William Wulf  (1989) as a “center without walls, in which the nation’s researchers can perform their research without regard to physical location, interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational resources, and accessing information in digital libraries”.

- It was redefined by Sara Bly in 1998 as “a system which combines the interests of the scientific community at large with those of the computer science and engineering community to create integrated, tool-oriented computing and communication systems to support scientific collaboration”

Collaboratories

Online Communities

proposal

For enabling sharing, creating, and collaborating on information and knowledge. Example tools for managing online collaboration and communities:
- Groupware
- Workflow Systems
- Email
- Chat rooms / VOIP
- Forums / Discussion boards

Collaboration / Community Management

For exchanging, sharing, acquiring, creating and distribution of information. Example tools for managing social software:
- Social networking metrics
- Topic maps / nets
- RSS analysis
- File hosting
- Traffic metrics

Social Software Management

For improving and facilitating collaboration in working groups. Example tools for peer-to-peer knowledge tools are:
- File sharing
- Synchronous communication

Learn Before

Related

Learn After