Emergence and Evolution of Nascent Online Communities: What Inhibits Members to Contribute?
Ignacio Perez Hallerbach, Michael Ian Barrett, Samer A Faraj · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2013
Online communities like Wikipedia have the potential to significantly transform our global society and economy. Despite their growing importance, however, the extant literature has theorized only little about how collaboration through member contributions actually happens in these spaces. In particular, it is unclear what inhibits the emergence and evolution of member contributions and thus collaboration in the early stages of an online community’s existence. Understanding such inhibitors is critical as they can make or break the long-term success of an online community. This paper thus aims to answer this question by applying a multi-method approach to a longitudinal case study of AshokaHub, a nascent global online community of social entrepreneurs. Despite positive signs and expectations at its launch and considerable efforts by the management team to drive member engagement, member contribution remained limited in its first year of existence. We advance a theoretical model for understanding limited member contribution in nascent online communities. This model suggests that important inhibitors are, firstly, limited OC design work related to boundary spanning, boundary reinforcement and the embedding of existing communities and practices, secondly, constraining platform materiality, and, finally, the failure to obtain critical mass.