a review of “A life-Cycle Perspective on Online Community Success” by Tag

This is a review of “A life-Cycle Perspective on Online Community Success”, a paper by: Alicia Iriberri and Gondy Leroy.

This paper reviewed researchers’ and practitioners’ literature on social computing. The aim of this review was to collect the success factors in those literatures and organize them into a pattern. The pattern consisted of five life stages (in a life-cycle), similar to the pattern used in information systems life-cycle. The process of creating this pattern starts first with discussing success metrics collected from the literature review. Then, they categorized the online communities into different types. Finally, the success metrics were categorized according to the corresponding stages of the life-cycle and the appropriate type of community. The authors assume that organizing these factors into stages will make it easier and more likely for a system to succeed.

It is important to mention here that the literature selected in this paper was based on searches in five databases using only two keywords, namely “online community” and “virtual community”. The search results included empirical and non-empirical studies and a mix of both were selected.

The authors claim that existing research have only focused on independent or “isolated” success factors (factors not related to a stage). However, the literature review they selected was based only on two terms: “online community” and “virtual community”. Even though the authors mentioned other synonymous terms, such as “social computing” and “web2.0”, these were not used as keywords. This raises the question of whether selecting different keywords in the literature selection process would have yielded different results. Additionally, even if a success factor is considered “isolated” from the authors’ pattern, this may not be the case from other researchers’ perspectives.

A second claim the authors made is that using “their” pattern in establishing an online community would make it more likely to succeed. However, this might raise the question of what success really is. Additionally, we find that some of the success metrics in the paper are vague words like “high volume” and “good quality”, these metrics are hard to be measured precisely. Moreover, some metrics like “number of visits per day” or “number of accounts” may not necessarily reflect the real usage. For example, we can get a higher number of visits by using some advertising strategies (e.g. pop-up windows). Also, it is easy for a member to create more than one account.

Finally, many of the advantages of online communities that the authors listed are actually applicable to offline communities. Whereas the disadvantages of the online communities were not taken in consideration. The online communities seem to be presented as a substitute for our “offline” life rather than a method to support our offline communities and address real life issues.

To conclude, I would like to highlight the comprehensiveness of this paper, which might make it like a bible for building online communities. However, as the authors mentioned, more practical work should be done using their pattern to test to what extent it could paly a significant role on the success of online communities.

 

 

The paper I selected for this week is : “Understanding Member Motivation for Contributing to Different Types of Virtual Communities: A Proposed Framework” By: Trevor D. Moore and Mark A. Serva

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1235000.1235035&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=727334186&CFTOKEN=39849031

 

 

3 keys :-

 

– Timing of implementing a success factor is crucial for community success

– Relating online communities to real-life events play a significant role in creating self-sustaining community

– Trust supporting systems must be applied to assist user define different levels of trusting other users