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What drives user contribution in an online community? A study in contributor influence and user status
Abstract
Online communities (OC's) depend on shared interests and user interactions mediated by technology. Successful OC's find ways to encourage these interactions to grow communities. Many OC's have influential users that help grow the community by their very presence and contributions. However, the process for identifying users having the greatest impact is not trivial. This study offers a new method for identifying these influential users through the creation of modified Hirsch indices, which improves upon the current method of using contribution counts or a survey method of polling other users. We validate the new measures against user status and then analyze the measures by correlating them against postings, thread starts, and views and replies to the thread starts for a shared interest OC. © (2012) by the AIS/ICIS Administrative Office All rights reserved.
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The design of online communities that promotes user participation is critical to the community’s success in fostering new ideas and innovations, building knowledge competencies, and strengthening customer relations. Social presence has been considered as a major design principle and important concept in explaining the relationship between online community artifacts and online user behavior. While most prior IS research adopts a unidimensional conceptualization of social presence and focuses on its effects on user attitude and/or behavior, this research employs a multidimensional conceptualization and demonstrates its suitability for understanding the effects of online community artifacts on social presence. More specifically, this research examines the effects of three categories of design artifacts (artifacts supporting self-presentation, deep profiling, and virtual co-presence) on three social presence dimensions (awareness, affective social presence and cognitive social presence). To validate the research model, a survey was conducted with four online communities. Different social presence dimensions were found to carry different weights in forming the overall sense of social presence and the effects of perceived usage of various online community artifacts varied for different social presence dimensions.
This study is part of a program aimed at creating measures enabling a fairer and more complete assessment of a scholar's contribution to a field, thus bringing greater rationality and transparency to the promotion and tenure process. It finds current approaches toward the evaluation of research productivity to be simplistic, atheoretic, and biased toward reinforcing existing reputation and power structures. This study examines the use of the Hirsch family of indices, a robust and theoretically informed metric, as an addition to prior approaches to assessing the s of IS researchers. It finds that while the top tier journals are important indications of a scholar's impact, they are neither the only nor, indeed, the most important sources of scholarly influence. Other ranking studies, by narrowly bounding the venues included in those studies, distort the discourse and effectively privilege certain venues by declaring them to be more highly influential than warranted. The study identifies three different categories of scholars: those who publish primarily in North American journals, those who publish primarily in European journals, and a transnational set of authors who publish in both geographies. Excluding the transnational scholars, for the scholars who published in these journal sets during the period of this analysis, we find that North American scholars tend to be more influential than European scholars, on average. We attribute this difference to a difference in the publication culture of the different geographies. This study also suggests that the ose with relatively low influence. Therefore, to be a part of the top European scholar list requires a higher level of influence than to be a part of the top North American scholar list.
Heinz Klein was a fine scholar and mentor whose work and life have inspired us to explore the notion of ‘scholarly influence’ which we cast as ‘ideational’ and ‘social influence’. We adopt a portfolio of measures approach, using the Hirsch family of statistics to assess ideational influence and Social Network Analysis centrality measures for social influence to profile Heinz Klein's contribution to information systems (IS) research. The results show that Heinz was highly influential in both ideational terms (a significant body of citations) and social terms (he is close to the heart of the IS research community). Reflecting on the major research themes and scholarly values espoused by Klein we define a ‘Kleinian view of IS research’, grounded in Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action, and use that to frame four affirmative propositions to address what we observe to be a distortion and attenuation of the academic discourse on the evaluation of scholarly production. This paper argues that focus should be shifted from the venue of publication of the research to the uptake of the ideas contained in it, thus increasing the openness of the discourse, participation in the discourse, truthfulness, and reduction of the inequities in power distribution within academia.
The rise of e-mail and other computer-based communication technologies has enabled members of global organizations to collaborate and exchange information to an uprecedented degree. The term “on-line community” (OLC), coined in the early days of computer networking, is now being applied to groups of employees with common professional goals and interests who seek to add value by extending themselves virtually. However, the performance of these corporate OLCs has not always kept pace with their lofty aspiration. To find out why, Arthur Andersen’s Next Generation Research Group, in cooperation with Anheuser-Busch, The Mutual Group, and Shell US, studied 15 very different OLCs. Among the questions we sought to answer were: how successful are OLCs in achieving their state purpose? What distinguishes a truly successful OLC? What are some pitfalls that everyone is encountering? This article presents findings and lessons learned from our in-depth interviews with the organizers of these virtual groups.