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Gamification, the idea of inserting game dynamics into portals or social networks, has recently evolved as an approach to encourage active participation in online communities. For an online community to start and proceed on to a sustainable operation, it is important that members are encouraged to contribute positively and frequently. We decided to introduce gamification in an online community that we designed and developed with the Australian Government's Department of Human Services to support welfare recipients transitioning from one payment to another. We first defined a formal model of gamification and a gamification design process. In instantiating our model to the online community, we realised that our context applied a number of constraints on the gamification elements that could be introduced. In this paper, we outline the design and implementation of a gamification model for online communities and its instantiation into our context, with its specific requirements. While we cannot comment on the success of gamification to drive user engagement in our context (for lack of the possibility of a controlled experiment), we found our implementation of badges-based gamification a helpful way to provide a useful abstraction on the life of the community, providing feedback enabling us to monitor and analyze the community. We thus show how feedback provided by such gamification data has a potential to be useful to community providers to better understand the community needs and addressing them appropriately to maintain a level of engagement in the community.

The focus of this study is on how online brand communities are utilised throughout the new product development (NPD) process by promoting communications between firms and communities. We investigate leading MP3 player manufacturers and mobile phone handset manufacturers in Korea. The results of our case studies show that the roles of online brand communities vary along the NPD stages — from trendsetters (lead users) to innovation facilitators (users as innovators), and information disseminators (early adopters). These communities can help firms gain insight into customer needs, desirable characteristics of new products and trends for future development. Furthermore, various inputs from online brand communities can stimulate firms' internal communication among several departments involved in the NPD. Finally, this study suggests the extended research model and generates hypotheses on the roles and impacts of online brand communities.

There is a growing stream of research unraveling individual motivations to participate in idea crowdsourcing and online user communities. While the current research has largely focused on individual user characteristics and overlooked the features of surrounding communities, our research turns the focus onto the actual community where knowledge is shared and created. We investigate the relationships between perceived support from a crowdsourcing community, and the users' intentions to share knowledge. Our research is based on a survey of 241 Chinese users of IdeasProject and shows that (1) for community trust, trust in the hosting firm has a significant effect on knowledge-sharing intentions, while collaborative norms do not; (2) for community support, both technology-based support and knowledge-based support have an effect on knowledge-sharing intentions. From a community management viewpoint, our results demonstrate the importance of providing continued support for knowledge integration, such as more opportunities for user-to-user interaction and features for providing constructive feedback.

While online communities of various nature proliferate in cyberspace, our understanding of the reasons underlying their success or failure is still at the initial stage. The present study contributes to this area through examining an abortive attempt to build an online learning community of part-time postgraduate students. The objective is to identify design considerations and strategies for extending an offline community to online. In this paper, we first elucidate the defining attributes of an online community and the key factors enabling an offline community to extend to online. On the basis of that, we explore the motivating and inhibiting factors for online participation, together with the challenges encountered by the externally initiated online community. Lastly, guidelines for developing online communities as extensions of physical ones are proposed. In particular, the interplay between designed and self-emergent aspects of community building are highlighted. The result of this study can provide guidelines for our future work and other similar community building endeavors.

WISE is a software platform that enables easy authoring and exchange of educational materials amongst learning science researchers. This paper charts the recent evolution of the WISE technology, sharing lessons learned and describing a new open source framework called SAIL. We identify key challenges and design principles for technology-enhanced learning environments, and describe how we applied these principles to help WISE move from a single-developer codebase to an international open source codebase shared among multiple technology projects. Finally, we discuss the new types of community this transition fosters.

The focus of this study is on how online brand communities are utilised throughout the new product development (NPD) process by promoting communications between firms and communities. We investigate leading MP3 player manufacturers and mobile phone handset manufacturers in Korea. The results of our case studies show that the roles of online brand communities vary along the NPD stages — from trendsetters (lead users) to innovation facilitators (users as innovators), and information disseminators (early adopters). These communities can help firms gain insight into customer needs, desirable characteristics of new products and trends for future development. Furthermore, various inputs from online brand communities can stimulate firms’ internal communication among several departments involved in the NPD. Finally, this study suggests the extended research model and generates hypotheses on the roles and impacts of online brand communities.

With the development of big data technology, the number of Internet users in China has exceeded 1 billion. With the help of a mature Internet community, the commercial value of public opinion dissemination is gaining more and more attention. It has attracted many scholars in the fields of journalism, social psychology, law, computer, and programming. How to identify favorable or harmful information, how to guide the correct public opinion, and how to turn public opinion into commercial value have become research hot topics in recent years. This paper sets the research object as the hot topic data on the Internet community Zhihu and calculates the relative public opinion dissemination efficiency level in each DMU through the DEA model. Then, these topics would be grouped into eight categories so that we could analyze the relationship between the number of hot topics and the percentage of high-efficiency topics. Finally, based on the statistical results, we obtain three main modes of public opinion communication and we infer the principle of how the mode forms.