Stimulating social engagement in a community network

Abstract

One of the most challenging problems facing builders and facilitators of community networks is to create and sustain social engagement among members. In this paper, we investigate the drivers of social engagement in a community network through the analysis of three data sources: activity logs, a member survey, and the content analysis of the conversation archives. We describe three important ways to encourage and support social engagement in online communities: through system design elements such as conversation channeling and event notification, by various selection criteria for community members, and through facilitation of specific kinds of discussion topics.