Reviewing ‘A life-cycle perspective on online community success’

I was asked to review Iriberry & Leroy’s paper A life-cycle perspective on online community success (2009). Their work summarises the state of the art in online communities in an information systems lifecycle framework. Arguably in a fast-growing research area like the one they are investigating, the state of the art in the present may be considerably different to when they first published the paper (a gap of 6 years). However, valuable lessons can be picked up from their work, which are still applicable today.

They surveyed a wide variety of papers to see how online communities evolve and what success factors play a role in each stage of evolution. For their survey, they chose 6 electronic databases the covered the disciplines that study online communities out of which 32 papers were chosen that were peer-reviewed and tested indicators of success. They identified four waves of research in the area from existing literature that they used as their base for discussions in online community success and listed the many benefits from the usage of online community.

The life-cycle model they proposed consists of:
Inception: idea for an online community emerges because of peoples needs for information, support, recreation or relationships.
creation: once the vision is identified, required technological components are selected and put in place, and the word is put out for other members to join.
growth: this stage happens when a culture and identity for the community begins to develop, a common member vocabulary is developed and members select the roles they all play in the community.
maturity: the need for more explicit and formal organisation with regulations and rewards for contributions etc. is recognised and built in.
death: if after maturity a community is not sustainable, they cease to exist. This can be due to poor participation, lack of quality content, unorganised contribution etc.

They identified this as an iterative process and identified various success factors for each stage in depth. For example, in the inception stage they expanded on the key success factors: purpose, focus, codes of conduct, trademark, funding sources. Furthermore, they cited backing statements and examples from the papers they surveyed.

One minor critique that I wish to voice is that due to the nature of their work being a review, they were using distinct examples for each life-cycle stage. It would have been helpful to see multiple stages through the help of a single example, so that future designers could see what a specific community could have done to avoid the death stage and become sustainable (for instance). As I alluded in my introduction, due to this being published in 2009, social networking communities had a fraction of the user base that they have today, so the authors do not give sites like Facebook, Twitter etc. much in the way of analysis. It would be interesting to see how a site liked Facebook managed to become sustainable, and become a dominant online community, and if it managed to fulfil all the indicators of success that the authors have proposed as mandatory in each life-cycle stage.

The paper I would like to identify is: Explicit Incentives in Online Communities: Boon or Bane? by Garnefeld (2012). This picks up the theme of success indicators by analysing the use of incentives to make an online community sustainable.

The three key considerations for online community research are:

• recognising that an online-community does not move along a linear life-cycle. Being iterative, a community needs to always be ready for change if the success factors are not met.
• creators / people involved in the initial stages are important in the early life-cycles of an online community, but as it starts growing, member participation is key. So much so that without a vital contribution from members, the online community will transition to a slow death.
• concerns about privacy are to be taken seriously. While other factors may slow down an online community’s growth, privacy and safety concerns can lead to its death. Privacy is to be guaranteed and security of personal data is to be valued highly.