Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2009
A Life Cycle Model of Virtual Communities
Elham Mousavidin
University of Houston
C.T. Bauer College of Business
Department of Decision & Information Sciences
[email protected]
Lakshmi Goel
University of Houston
C.T. Bauer College of Business
Department of Decision & Information Sciences
[email protected]
Abstract
communities of practice as a tool to add a human side
to their knowledge management (KM) systems. Some
of these companies include HP British Petroleum,
Chevron, Ford, Xerox, Raytheon, IBM, and Shell
[23]. Some virtual communities grow rapidly in
popularity and membership and pass the test of time,
while others fail. A systematic conceptual framework
that explains the life of virtual communities has not
yet been developed. Some successful virtual
communities do not start off as being successful.
These communities go through a phase of major
silence [30, 47] before gaining life. Some other
abandoned, or dead, communities sometimes become
active again. While most research on virtual
communities focuses on the motivators and barriers
of participation, little research addresses the holistic
notion of the life and death of a virtual community. In
this paper, we focus on the life cycle of virtual
communities, and the factors that affect it. The paper
concludes with a conceptual model of the life of
virtual communities. This conceptual model aims at
providing a starting point for a framework for virtual
community life cycle research.
The importance of virtual communities is well
established in Information Systems (IS) research. A
significant number of studies on this topic have
focused on investigating motivators and inhibitors of
members’
participation.
However,
virtual
communities are not static, but dynamically evolve,
and often ‘die’ to be replaced by other virtual
communities. To date, there is very little research
that investigates the life cycle of virtual communities.
The goal of this research is to identify influences that
could explain this phenomenon. We summarize our
insights in the form of a conceptual model.
1. Introduction
Literature on virtual communities (VCs) has its
roots in Electronic Information Exchange Systems
(EIESs), which were computer conferencing systems,
connecting people electronically [4]. Since then
electronic communication has evolved from virtual
Bulletin Boards, in late 1970s, to commercialized
Multi-User Dungeons/Domains (MUDs), in the early
1980s, to current forms of virtual communities, such
as social systems like Orkut, Facebook, or Slashdot
[37]. The technologies associated with the evolving
form of virtual communities have also changed from
text-based interfaces to graphically rich environments
in applications such as MMORPGs (Massively
Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games).
While the “community” aspect has been
questioned in a virtual setting by some [11, 24, 26,
46, 55], many researchers view the virtual medium as
a means to build communities when not possible in
real life [7, 40, 52, 53, 54, 59, 64]. This mixed
opinion about virtual communities has not
discouraged growth of virtual communities. Many
prominent multinational companies have used virtual
2. Literature Review
In this section we review literature on virtual
communities to get an understanding of, and draw on
the current body of knowledge. In the literature
review, we look at emergent themes that could
explain the phenomenon more clearly. In doing so,
we first review different approaches in existing
literature through which virtual communities have
been studied. We next draw on prior research to
elucidate each element that comprises our conceptual
model for the life of a virtual community. We
subsequently present the resultant conceptual model.
978-0-7695-3450-3/09 $25.00 © 2009 IEEE
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Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2009
2.1. Different approaches to studying VCs
There are three predominant approaches to
studying virtual communities. First, at the level of
analysis of the community as a whole, research is
focused on the sense of community felt by all
members and the issues around it. Second, at the
discourse level of analysis, the focus is on individual
members and the content that results from the
discourse in the community. Third, at the level of the
analysis of the relationships between members, the
focus is on ties and links among members. We
present literature on each of the three approaches
next.
Researchers have used the term “virtual
communities” loosely to refer to a number of people
with shared interests communicating through a
virtual medium [62]. However, there has not been
consensus on the criteria based on which an online
group would qualify as a “community.” For the most
part, virtual communities have been compared to real
life (RL) communities. Therefore, a sense of
community, or sense of connectedness to the group,
has been considered a significant factor for
sustainability by some researchers [e.g. 25].
Blanchard and Markus [10] define sense of virtual
community as “a feeling of membership, influence,
need fulfillment and emotional connection.” (p. 69)
They add that if sense of virtual community “SOVC”
exists, members maintain norms and show support
and reveal other community-like behaviors. They
found members’ recognition by others, identifying
them by their names, providing them with socioemotional support, developing personal relationships
with them, building emotional attachments, and
feeling obligated to give back to the community were
some of the community behaviors that members
revealed. They classified these behaviors under three
general categories: exchanging support, creating
identities and making identifications, and production
of trust. Trust has also been studied in other VC
studies [39] and extensively in other virtual settings;
e.g. virtual teams [28, 29, 49, 50].
Other streams of research do not view a sense of
community as critical to virtual communities. They
view VCs (which they call virtual publics) more of a
discourse medium [21, 30]. Erickson [21] considers
the notion of community as a background mechanism
that supports discourse among the members; i.e. it is
a means to an end. This, they believe, brings the
focus to the medium and the discourse. To them, it is
the discourse rather than the sense of community that
facilitates the activities of the VC. For example,
discourse enables the newcomers to go through the
conversations in the form of posts/threads and get a
better understanding of the community, which is an
advantage over the real life conversations. In
identifying factors that influence membership, Jones
and Rafaeli [30] study the potential population of
people interested in a specific discourse, awareness
of that population of the existence of a virtual public
that fosters the discourse, availability of the
technology to support the group, technical
proficiency of the interested population, and
maximum capacity or the limit beyond which
information overload occurs.
Some researchers use social network analysis to
study VCs. This approach investigates how
information flows among people and organizations
through direct and indirect ties [8, 65]. The focus
here is on the relationships rather than on the
individuals or the community as a whole. According
to this approach, weak ties can be more useful than
strong ties in tightly knitted networks because it
provides more diversity and thus access to more
types of expertise [22].
As can be seen, the major part of literature has
been dedicated to identifying factors that influence
member participation. Hence, irrespective of the
approach adopted, the level of participation the
community supports defines the life of that
community [57]. When there is no participation, a
community can be surmised to be ‘dead’.
We adopt a holistic perspective that draws on
each of the three approaches i.e., the community, the
discourse, and the network, thereby, adopting a broad
definition of virtual communities [12]. Specifically,
we delve into socially shaped aspects, technologically
facilitated features, individually demonstrated
characteristics, and the external influences as
elements that emerged from our literature review. We
next present literature on each of these elements in
detail.
2.2. Socially Shaped Aspects
While some believe that a narrow scope would be
detrimental to the community [11, 26, 46] others
have found that narrow scope is required to keep the
community focused [30]. In the former case, the
researchers argue that narrowness of scope would
limit the sense of community and it might even lead
to weakening of RL communities. Others argue that
when the community is overloaded with messages,
segmentation and narrowing the scope of the topics
could actually help. Otherwise, members either drop
out or change their communication behavior [13, 30,
31]. For example, they might lower their response
rates. The reason for this is that they find the
information to be redundant.
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Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2009
Another reason for not using the community as a
source might be the nature of problems. Some
problems are perceived to be difficult to convey in a
virtual setting (e.g. process-oriented problems). In
addition, receiving a large number of irrelevant
answers when one needs a quick and accurate answer
might prohibit a member to turn to the virtual
community for answer. Sometimes in the case of
overload, the signal to noise (useful to undesirable
information) ratio decreases [42]. In some studies,
moderation and control (mere illusion of them, in
some cases) showed to be influential in reducing the
noise [31].
In some cases, it has been seen that members
defend the boundaries of the community together.
For example members, as a group, respond to
outsiders’ inflammatory messages [58]. Jones and
Rafaeli [30] argue that an expanded ‘virtual public’
in the form of a ‘mega virtual public’ cannot be
sustained. Therefore, interrelated, smaller, and more
focused virtual publics are created through
‘segmentation strategy.’ This helps with the problem
of information overload as well.
Some other factors such as culture of community
(or organization), and nature of the community (e.g.
engineering) also encourage participation [2, 27, 62].
When people sharing the same “practice” [63] and
interests belong to a certain social group, others in
the same practice are drawn towards that group, thus
increasing the size of the community. For example, if
a large group of Indian software engineers have
profiles on Linkedin, others who hear about it are
motivated to join in.
While some researchers believe that an increase in
size of a community leads to increase in participation
[14], others do not see it as a critical factor. The latter
group goes even further to argue that increase in size
could be detrimental because it might lead to
information overload [30, 31]. They acknowledge
though that even in sustained groups, there are
usually periods of silence [47]. Many researchers
have found that a small percentage of the members
make most of the contribution and many others ‘free
ride’ [30, 38]. Most researchers agree that a virtual
community needs to reach a critical mass (with a
common understanding from beginning) before it can
generate heterogeneity of resources needed, which
could lead to reasonable amount of participation [30,
31, 42, 43, 51].
In summary, socially shaped aspects encompass
the scope of the content, the norms and culture
embodied in the practices of the community,
techniques of moderation, and the size and critical
mass of the membership of the community.
2.3. Technologically Facilitated Features
When it comes to designing VCs, in order to aim
for success, some recommend minimal design in the
beginning, followed by experimentation, evaluation,
and refinement of new features. This way, they argue,
the community technical features that support a
virtual community will be built to suit the needs and
the interest of its members as they emerge [6, 42].
This is called co-evolutionary design or “design from
inside” [6], which is not mechanistic [34]. Barab et
al. [6], in designing the VC under their investigation,
mainly focus on complex dualities or tensions (e.g.
local needs of members vs. goals of organization) [6,
19, 20, 66]. They recommend that a community
should decide on a design by balancing such
dualities.
However, in arriving at a minimal design, we
need to consider what technologies best support the
objectives of that community [23]. In doing so, new
technologies that emerge and that support social
systems, need to be incorporated in the “shell” of
virtual community. The Web 2.0 technologies
support constructivist approaches of participation and
knowledge generation, and hence are suitable
platforms for virtual communities. Technologies such
as weblogs, wikis, peer-to-peer systems, virtual
worlds, tagging, and syndication, allow for better
support of community participation [23].
In summary, the nature of the technologies that
support the communities could influence the life of
the virtual communities.
2.4.
Individually
Characteristics
Demonstrated
A number of researchers have considered the
contributions of a virtual public as ‘public good’ that
is in accord with gift transactions [35, 51]. In a gift
transaction, the receiver is implicitly obliged to return
the favor at some point. Therefore, the contributions
continue on a ‘virtual public’ [2]. Some other
researchers, on the other hand, take a utilitarian
position and argue that motivation for contribution is
self-interest, e.g. gaining reputation [4, 18, 62].
However, some of these researchers do not see this in
conflict with caring for welfare of others [4]. For
example, Wasko and Faraj [62] acknowledged that
both tangible and intangible benefits to individuals as
well as contribution to the knowledge of the
community as a whole can be motivating factors for
participation of individuals. Tangible returns
included getting access to useful information,
expertise and best practices, receiving answers to
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Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2009
their questions, availability and accessibility,
usefulness for problem-solving, a good source for
managing knowledge from different sources, helping
new employees integrate to the system faster,
bringing geographically dispersed people together,
timeliness of information, integrated features (email,
websites, etc.), and using other members as filters or
guides. Self-actualization through feeling confident,
having a chance to show off, and strengthening skills
was mentioned as a main intangible return.
In their study of electronic networks of practice,
Wasko and Faraj [63], found that members with high
level of centrality in the network, perceived enhanced
reputation, and strong sense of commitment
contribute more helpful responses to the network. In
addition, individuals with perceived enhanced
reputation, high level of network centrality, having
longer tenure in the shared practice, and being guided
by the norms of the group contribute greater number
of messages to the group.
Besides motivating factors researchers have
identified some barriers to participation in virtual
communities. Wasko and Faraj [62] found that even
when they give highest priority to the well being of
organization and their community, employees still
hesitate to share if they have fear of being criticized
and ridiculed, or misleading other members with their
answers. This was shown to be more common among
new members (employees). Another set of barriers
identified is lack of time, and requirement for
security and confidentiality [57]. In the case of fear
of breaching the confidentiality, the employees used
other means (e.g. telephone or individual emails) to
share their knowledge, or they simply self-censored.
In
summary,
individually
demonstrated
characteristics include the concepts of public good,
utilitarian perspective (which incorporates selfinterest, reputation, self-actualization, and intangible
and tangible returns), network centrality, fear of
criticism and ridicule, fear of misleading others, lack
of time, security and confidentiality.
2.5. External Influences
The age at which individuals are exposed to
technologies such as the Internet and social
networking keeps decreasing. Disney’s Toontown,
Whyville, Barbie Girls and Club Penguin are only
some examples of the many virtual communities that
are available for pre-teens. By the time they are in
high school, most individuals in the US are very
comfortable with navigating the web using rich
interfaces to communicate and conduct business [16].
As this generation gets assimilated into the future
workforce, technologies for communication will
reflect their needs. We see an increasing use of wikis
and forum-oriented platforms in the workplace today.
The use of these technologies is fuelled by the
effect of external media that the “milleneals”, or the
generation that has grown up in the 80s, is exposed to
[32]. News stories on television, radio, and news
articles available online, discuss virtual communities
as a commonplace phenomenon [9]. Press coverage
of weblogs, wikis, and social networking sites like
Facebook or MySpace popularize these technologies
[56], increasing individuals’ curiosity and motivating
them to participate. Some news companies choose to
have a presence inside virtual communities, thus
further drawing members to the community [41, 60].
For example, the recent media coverage of the virtual
world, Second Life, popularizes the use of the
technology for business [61] and education [1].
Other external influences such as political
environment in the case of non-organizational virtual
communities (for example internet censorship) and
support by top management in organizational settings
[57] also affect the life of a virtual community.
In summary, various external influences such as
demographics,
external
media,
political
environments, and top management support can
influence the popularity of and thus the life of virtual
communities.
3. The Life of Virtual Communities
The review of literature presented gives us an
overall picture of the aspects that influence the life of
virtual communities. We define life as active
participation [12] and further generation of
community-specific content by its members. This is
in line with the adaptive structuration view of
technology where the change process within a
technology emerges in human action as people
interact with the technology [17]. In the figure below
we present a conceptual model that depicts the
elements related to the life of a virtual community. It
is important to note that a research agenda based on
our conceptual model would need to take into
account the complexities of each element. For
example, when studying socially shaped aspects,
psychological, social-psychological as well as
sociological factors need to be investigated.
However, a life cycle model is useful when framing a
research agenda since it provides a metaphor [48] or
a naive model [36] for complex social phenomena.
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Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2009
Figure 1: Conceptual model of virtual community life cycle
As shown in the life cycle model, the life of a
virtual community is influenced by four elements –
namely socially shaped aspects, individually
demonstrated
characteristics,
technologically
facilitated features, and the external media. However,
this is a dynamic cycle. While prior literature
emphasizes the impact of various factors on
participation in a predominantly positivist approach,
we argue that the existence of the virtual community
in turn influences the various elements that affect it –
thus begging a process oriented, emergent approach.
Hence, as the life of a virtual community changes,
there are changes in socially shaped aspects such as
the size of the community, its critical mass, scope and
culture. As the life of a virtual community changes,
individually demonstrated characteristics such as
tangible and intangible returns and utility may
change. For example, a community with high
participation could be more valuable and helpful to a
member than a community with low participation. As
the life of a virtual community changes, technologies
may evolve to support the changing needs of the
members. For example Facebook allows third-party
lightweight applications to be “plugged in” to
members’ profiles if desired. Finally, as the life of a
virtual community changes, external factors such as
the interest of media in the virtual community may
change.
This model has implications for research in virtual
communities. While there is little attention paid to
“dead” communities, i.e. communities that have low
active participation, the conceptual model proposes
that such communities have the potential to be
revived based on the four elements. We next discuss
specific implications and avenues for future research.
4. Discussion and Future Research
In this paper, we focus on an important but underresearched topic – the life cycle of virtual
communities. We draw on the plethora of existing
literature on virtual communities that adopt different
approaches to studying factors affecting membership
and participation. In arriving at a holistic conceptual
model, we suggest that the phenomenon be looked at
from an emergent, constructivist perspective, rather
than a positivist one. We identify the elements
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Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2009
associated with the life cycle of a virtual community.
The conceptual model has implications for research
and practice in virtual communities.
The conceptual model can be used as a sensitizing
lens for specific virtual communities and make sense
of their nature. Future research can delve into each
element and shed light to specific characteristics, or
trace their evolution over time. A longitudinal study
of a virtual community would help in further
understanding the dynamics of the life cycle model
[45]. Comparing virtual communities that are “alive”
with those that are “dead” and conducting a crosscase analysis would help contrast the elements in
both contexts. The conceptual model can be
enhanced by future research that adds more elements
or further refines each. One of the limitations of this
study is that we have not identified specific stages
within the life cycle of a virtual community.
Empirically investigating various types of virtual
communities or different contexts in which virtual
communities may exist would help identify specific
stages within the life of those virtual communities
[3]. For example, [33] delves into disengagement (i.e.
the stage when members leave) from a virtual
community. Our study is intended to be a starting
point for a discussion of the phenomenon of the life
cycle of virtual communities.
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