Beyond Information: Developing the Relationship between the Individual and the Group in Online Communities

Acknowledgments: We thank Zoe Ouyang, Kenneth Chan, and David J. Housman for research assistance; Marc A. Smith at Microsoft Research and David Jeske at Google for providing data; Carolyn Rosé, Jaime Arguello, Cam- eron Williams and William Cohen at Carnegie Mellon University for advice about text and content analy- sis; and Kimberly Ling for helpful feedback and discussion throughout the process of conducting this search. This research is supported by NSF grant IIS-0325049. ,2 Beyond Information: Developing the Relationshipbetween the Individual and the Group in Online Communities Abstract Online communities,are increasingly important for both the businesses and the general public that uses them. However, current IS research on online communities has a limited view of these groups, treating them primarily as information repositories, where people participate by seeking or contributing knowl- edge. This paper argues that online communities,are also social systems with which people form relation- ships and repeatedly interact over time. This paper proposes a relational model of online communities,that emphasizes the social, bi-directional, and dynamic nature of the interactions in online communities and the way that these interactions build and maintain the relationship between,individuals and the commu-