Participation, lurking and successful online communities
Abstract
Online community developers and managers are always worried about lurkers. They want them to 'actively' participate by posting messages and chatting. Even the term 'lurker' carries strong pejorative connotations. Yet many lurkers view themselves as community members who have altruistic motives for their behaviour. In this talk I will discuss a study in which we examined lurking behaviour in 100 online health support and technical support communities. We collected data using in-depth interviews and by logging the activity of the communities over a three-month period. I will also present some preliminary findings from a study in progress in which we used online questionnaires to study over 350 online communities from four different categories of communities. Together these studies present a rich picture of participation and lurking online. The findings pose some interesting challenges for those designing software for online communities and for those managing activity in online communities. The talk will end with a brief discussion of criteria for judging the success of online communities. Participants' concepts of success often differ from those of developers.
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