Online participation

Several motivations lead people to contribute to virtual communities. Various online media (i.e. Blogs, Chat rooms, Electronic mailing lists, Internet forums, Wikis), are becoming ever greater knowledge-sharing resources. Many of these communities are highly cooperative and establish their own unique culture. They also involve significant time from contributors with no monetary gain.

Knowledge sharing infrastructures

Some key examples of online knowledge sharing infrastructures include the following:

• Wikipedia: An online, publicly editable encyclopaedia with hundreds of thousands of editors
• Slashdot: A popular technology-related forum, with articles and comments from readers. Slashdot subculture has become well-known in Internet circles. Users accumulate a "karma score" and volunteer moderators are selected from those with high scores.
• Usenet: Established in 1980, as a "distributed Internet discussion system,"^{[citation needed]} it became the first medium for Internet communities. Volunteer moderators and votetakers contribute to the community.
• Etc. (the Web2.0 is also referred to as the writable web for indicating that many people participate to the creation of its content)

In the past important online knowledge sharing infrastructures included:

• AOL: The largest of the online service providers, with chat rooms which for years were voluntarily moderated by community leaders. It should be noted that rooms and most message boards are no longer moderated, however.
• The WELL: A pioneering online community established in 1985. The WELL's culture has been the subject of several books and articles. Many users voluntarily contribute to community building and maintenance (e.g., as conference hosts).

Theories

Several researchers have investigated motivation in virtual communities. Studies show that over the long term users gain a greater insight into the material that is being discussed and a sense of connection to the world at large.

Peter Kollock researched motivations for contributing to online communities. Kollock (1999, p. 227) outlines three motivations that do not rely on altruistic behavior on the part of the contributor: anticipated reciprocity; increased recognition; and sense of efficacy.

There is another motivation, implicit in the above, which Marc Smith mentions in his 1992 thesis: Voices from the WELL: The Logic of the Virtual Commons: "Communion", as Smith terms it, or "sense of community" as it is referred to in social psychology.

Anticipated reciprocity

A person is motivated to contribute valuable information to the group in the expectation that one will receive useful help and information in return. Indeed, there is evidence that active participants in online communities get more responses faster to questions than unknown participants (Kollock 1999, p. 178).

Increased recognition

Recognition is important to online contributors such that, in general, individuals want recognition for their contributions. Some have called this Egoboo. Kollock outlines the importance of reputation online: “Rheingold (1993) in his discussion of the WELL (an early online community) lists the desire for prestige as one of the key motivations of individuals’ contributions to the group. To the extent this is the concern of an individual, contributions will likely be increased to the degree that the contribution is visible to the community as a whole and to the extent there is some recognition of the person’s contributions. … the powerful effects of seemingly trivial markers of recognition (e.g. being designated as an “official helper”) has been commented on in a number of online communities…”

One of the key ingredients of encouraging a reputation is to allow contributors to be known or not to be anonymous. The following example, from Meyers (1989) study of the computer underground illustrates the power of reputation. When involved in illegal activities, computer hackers must protect their personal identities with pseudonyms. If hackers use the same nicknames repeatedly, this can help the authorities to trace them. Nevertheless, hackers are reluctant to change their pseudonyms regularly because the status associated with a particular nickname would be lost.

On the importance of online identity: Profiles and reputation are clearly evident in online communities today. Amazon.com is a case in point, as all contributors are allowed to create profiles about themselves and as their contributions are measured by the community, their reputation increases. Myspace.com encourages elaborate profiles for members where they can share all kinds of information about themselves including what music they like, their heroes, etc. In addition to this, many communities give incentives for contributing. For example, many forums award Members points for posting. Members can spend these points in a virtual store. eBay is an example of an online community where reputation is very important because it is used to measure the trustworthiness of someone you potentially will do business with. With eBay, you have the opportunity to rate your experience with someone and they, likewise, can rate you. This has an effect on the reputation score. The participants may therefore be encouraged to manage their online identity in order to make a good impression on the other members of the community.

Sense of efficacy

Individuals may contribute valuable information because the act results in a sense of efficacy, that is, a sense that they have had some effect on this environment. There is well-developed research literature that has shown how important a sense of efficacy is (e.g. Bandura 1995), and making regular and high quality contributions to the group can help individuals believe that they have an impact on the group and support their own self-image as an efficacious person.

Wikipedia is a good example of an online community that gives contributors a sense of efficacy. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia which uses online software to enable anyone to create new articles and change any article in the encyclopedia. The changes you make are immediate, obvious, and available to the world.

Sense of community

People, in general, are fairly social beings and it is motivating to many people to receive direct responses to their contributions. Most online communities enable this by allowing people to reply back to contributions (i.e. many Blogs allow comments from readers, one can reply back to forum posts, etc.). Again, using Amazon.com as an example, other users can rate whether one's product review was helpful or not. Granted, there is some overlap between increasing reputation and gaining a sense of community. However, it seems safe to say that there are some overlapping areas between all four motivators.

In addition to participants that actively contribute to online discussions, many people join virtual community spaces and do not post, a concept referred to as lurking (Preece 2009). There are several reasons why people choose not to participate online, and chief among them are: getting what they needed without having to participate actively, thinking that they were being helpful by not posting, wanting to learn more about the community before diving in, not being able to use the software because of poor usability and not liking the dynamics that they observed within the group (Preece, Nonnecke & Andrews 2004) (Bishop 2007).

Online participation and psychology

Studies have also found that the nature and the level of participation in online social networking sites have been correlated with the personality of the participants. The Department of Psychology in the University of Windsor found some levels of correlation in the articles “Personality and motivations associated with Facebook use” and “The Influence of Shyness on the Use of Facebook in an Undergraduate Sample”. The articles state that people who have high levels of anxiety or stress or a shy personality are more likely to favor socializing through the Internet. The reason for this is because they are able to communicate with others without being face-to-face, and mediums such as chat rooms give a sense of anonymity, which makes them feel more comfortable in getting involved in discussions with their peers^{[citation needed]}.

Participation in the social web

Online participation is relevant in different systems of the social web such as:

• Blogging (Nardi et al. 2004)
• Micro-blogging (Java et al. 2007)
• Online dating services (Siibak 2007)
• Social bookmarking (Benbunan-Fich & Koufaris 2008) (Ames & Naaman 2007)
• Social network services (Krasnova et al. Nowobilska) (Schaefer 2008) (Joinson 2008) (Jacobs 2009) (Penenberg 2009)
• Virtual worlds (Yee 2006)
• Wiki (Rafaeli & Ariel 2008) (Oded 2007) (Wilkinson & Huberman 2007)

See also

Collective intelligence e-participation Knowledge ecosystem Legitimate peripheral participation (in Community of practice‎) Lurking Motivation Motivations of Wikipedia Contributors Online communities Online identity Online Community of Practice

Reputation system‎ Self-efficacy Sense of community Social actions Social cognition Social exchange theory Social translucence Virtual communities Virtual community of practice 1% rule (Internet culture)

References

• Ames, Morgan; Mor, Naaman (2007). "Why We Tag: Motivations for Annotation in Mobile and Online Media". Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems (CHI 2007), San Jose, CA, USA, 2007. http://yahooresearchberkeley.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/chi2007-Ames-whyWeTag.pdf. 
• Benbunan-Fich, Raquel; Koufaris, Marios (2008). "Motivations and Contribution Behaviour in Social Bookmarking Systems: An Empirical Investigation". Electronic Markets 18 (2): 150–160. doi:10.1080/10196780802044933. 
• Bishop, J. (2007). "Increasing participation in online communities: A framework for human–computer interaction". Computers in Human Behavior 23 (4): 1881–1893. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2005.11.004. http://zaphod.mindlab.umd.edu/docSeminar/pdfs/sdarticle.pdf. 
• Krasnova, H.; Hildebrand, H.; Günther, O.; Kovrigin, A.; Nowobilska, A. (2008). "Why Participate in an Online Social Network: An Empirical Analysis". Proc. 16th European Conf. on Information Systems. (ECIS 2008). http://is2.lse.ac.uk/asp/aspecis/20080183.pdf. 
• Jacobs, Gina (2009). "National Poll: Young People See Social Networking as Attention Seeking". SDSU News, Tuesday, August 25, 2009. http://newscenter.sdsu.edu/sdsu_newscenter/news.aspx?s=71510. 
• Java, Akshay; Song, Xiaodan; Finin, Tim; Tseng, Belle (2007). Why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities. Proceedings of the 9th WebKDD and 1st SNA-KDD 2007 workshop on Web mining and social network analysis. pp. 56–65. http://aisl.umbc.edu/get/softcopy/id/1073/1073.pdf 
• Joinson, Adam N. (2008). "Looking at, looking up or keeping up with people? Motives and use of Facebook". SIGCHI 2008. pp. 1027–1036 
• Kollock, Peter (1999). "The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace". In Smith, Marc; Kollock, Peter. Communities in Cyberspace. London: Routledge. pp. 220–239. http://www.connectedaction.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/2001-peter-kollock-economies-of-online-cooperation.htm. 
• Meyer, Gordon R. (1989). "The social Organization of the Computer Underground". Masters thesis in Sociology, Northern Illinois University. http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/secpubs/hacker.txt. 
• Nardi, Bonnie A.; Schiano, Diane J.; Gumbrecht, Michelle; Swartz, Luke (2004). "Why We Blog". Communications of the ACM 47 (12): 41–46. doi:10.1145/1035134.1035163. 
• Nov, Oded (2007). "What motivates Wikipedians" (^{[dead link]}). Communications of the ACM 50 (11): 60–64. doi:10.1145/1297797.1297798. http://faculty.poly.edu/~onov/Nov_Wikipedia_motivations.doc. 
• Penenberg, Adam L. (October 13, 2009). "Facebook is no fad (Commentary: Social networking is a basic human need)". MarketWatch. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/social-networking-moves-beyond-fad-to-destiny-2009-10-13. 
• Preece, J. (2009). "An event-driven community in washington, DC: Forces that influence participation". In Foth, M.. Handbook of research on urban informatics: The practice and promise of the real-time city. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. ISBN 978-1-60566-152-0. http://vrolik.de/book/. 
• Preece, J.; Nonnecke, B.; Andrews, D. (2004). "The top five reasons for lurking: improving community experiences for everyone". Computers in Human Behavior 20 (2): 201–223. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2003.10.015. http://www.ifsm.umbc.edu/~preece/Papers/CHB_Corrected_Proof.pdf. 
• Rafaeli, S.; Ariel, Y. (2008). "Online motivational factors: Incentives for participation and contribution in Wikipedia". In Barak, A.. Psychological aspects of cyberspace: Theory, research, applications. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521873010. http://gsb.haifa.ac.il/~sheizaf/cyberpsych/11-Rafaeli&Ariel.pdf. 
• Rheingold, Howard (1993). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (1st. ed.). Addison-Wesley Pub. Co. ISBN 9780201608700. http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/intro.html. 
• Schaefer, Cora (2008). "Motivations and usage patterns on social network sites". Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), Galway, Ireland, 2008. http://is2.lse.ac.uk/asp/aspecis/20080180.pdf 
• Siibak, A. (2007). "Casanova's of the Virtual World. How Boys Present Themselves on Dating Websites". Young People at the Crossroads: 5th International Conference on Youth Research in Karelia; Petrozavodsk, Republic of Karelia, Russian Federation; September 1–5, 2006. (Eds.) M. Muukkonen& K. Sotkasiira. Joensuu University: Joensuun yliopisto. pp. 83–91. ISBN 978-952-219-020-8. http://mail.jrnl.ut.ee:8080/35/ 
• Wilkinson, Dennis M.; Huberman, Bernardo A. (2007). "Assessing the Value of Cooperation in Wikipedia". First Monday 12 (4): 60–64. http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1763/1643. 
• Yee, Nick (2006). "The Demographics, Motivations, and Derived Experiences of Users of Massively Multi-User Online Graphical Environments". Presence 15 (3): 309–329. doi:10.1162/pres.15.3.309. 

Notes

External links

• Community Equity Specification - Sun project which objective is to build a dynamic Social Value system by calculating the Contribution, Participation, Skills, and Reputation equity a person can gain by actively engaging in online communities.