Ecology of Online Communities
Author
TeBlunthuis, Nathan E
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Show full item recordAbstract
How do competitive struggles for resources or symbiotic relationships that support a web ofinterdependent communities shape the evolution of online organizing? Most prior studies of
online community success have focused almost exclusively on communities' internal features,
but in biology and organization studies, ecological approaches have shown that success is
largely---and sometimes overwhelmingly---a function of what others groups are doing. This
dissertation contributes to the fields of Human Computer Interaction, Social Computing and
Communication an ecological analysis that accounts for the complex dynamic interactions
between communities and their environments and is important for understanding the successes
and failures of online communities.
The theoretical foundations are in organizational ecology, a vast social scientific literature that
applies ecology to human organizations. Online communities are very different from classicalorganizations, so this investigation required empirically validating basic assumptions about when
online communities will be competitive or mutualistic. It uses linear and nonlinear time series
analysis of clusters of online communities to shows that mutualistic relationships are more
common than competitive ones.
Interviews with members of overlapping online communities empirically support and explain
this widespread mutualism in terms of tensions between the types of benefits of participating in
online communities. Instead of resolving these tensions using a complex organization that
provides the full range benefits, people build multiple relatively simple communities each
specializing in a subset of benefits. Designers of platforms for online communities should
cultivate ecosystems of overlapping and differentiated communities by supporting resource
sharing and simultaneous participation in many communities.
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- Communications [116]