This article treats the question how to form a user group around an application.We examined the recommendations from the theorists and the practitioners concerning how to form a community. The results of this examination was compared with the results of a field study, where we examined a number of different kinds of communities in regard to what the sociologist, the economists and the
... [Show full abstract] practitioners have said to be important when forming a community. The result of this study was to us a bit surprising when we found that the recommendations were not followed at all concerning user groups, despite the fact that the software companies want to form a sense of community. We believe this contradiction is due to the fact that the theorists and practitioners talk about smaller groups. Keywords: BRT 1. Introduction 1.1. Background It is becoming more and more usual to find software companies who try to gather the users in user groups. A user group is a special kind of community. The companies ...