Community Dynamics In An Online Law Journal
Aldo de Moor, Sjef van Erp · Research portal (Tilburg University) · 2004
Online communities are continuously evolving socio-technical systems.To provide them with better change management support, a systematic analysis of the norms that govern their evolution is required.In this paper, we present an approach that was used to analyze the community dynamics in an online law journal.Electronic journals in the legal domain are essential instruments in the validation and distribution of new legal knowledge.To ensure the high quality of these e-journals, the dynamics of the online communities in which the various journal stakeholders interact need to be well understood.We outline the evolution of one of the first successful legal e-journals: the Electronic Journal of Comparative Law.We describe the change management lessons learnt in practice and use these to illustrate our diagnostic approach for self-governance analysis in virtual communities.