Audience-specific online community design
Communications of the ACM - Supporting community and building social capital
Supporting Trust in Virtual Communities
HICSS '00 Proceedings of the 33rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences-Volume 6 - Volume 6
The experienced "sense" of a virtual community: characteristics and processes
ACM SIGMIS Database
You Are Who You Talk To: Detecting Roles in Usenet Newsgroups
HICSS '06 Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - Volume 03
Non-public and public online community participation: Needs, attitudes and behavior
Electronic Commerce Research
Sense of Virtual Community: A Conceptual Framework and Empirical Validation
International Journal of Electronic Commerce
Journal of Information Science
Working for Free? Motivations for Participating in Open-Source Projects
International Journal of Electronic Commerce
The development of a sense of virtual community
International Journal of Web Based Communities
Testing a model of sense of virtual community
Computers in Human Behavior
The community is where the rapport is -- on sense and structure in the youtube community
Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Communities and technologies
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Member-initiated virtual communities for product knowledge sharing and commerce purposes are proliferating as useful alternatives to company information and commerce Web sites. Although such communities are easy to create with the availability of numerous tools, the challenge lies in keeping the community alive and thriving. Key to sustainability is members' Sense Of Virtual Community (SOVC) so that they feel responsible for contributing their knowledge and creating value for others. However, it is unclear what leads to the SOVC among knowledge contributors. Building on appraisal theory, we hypothesize that the fulfillment of contributors' informational, instrumental, entertainment, self-discovery, and social enhancement needs will increase their SOVC. To test the hypotheses, we surveyed knowledge contributors in a beauty-product-related community to examine the relationship between their needs' fulfillment and SOVC levels. Other than the social enhancement need, all other needs' fulfillment were found to be positively related to SOVC levels. To further understand how the SOVC of knowledge contributors changes over time, we conducted a longitudinal analysis of a panel of these members. We discovered that over time, changes in the perceived fulfillment of their instrumental, entertainment, and self-discovery needs determined the change of their SOVC. The results have implications for future research as well as for the sustainability and value generation from such virtual communities.