Lurker demographics: counting the silent
Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Knowledge creation in focus groups: can group technologies help?
Information and Management
Sorting things out: classification and its consequences
Sorting things out: classification and its consequences
The quality of online social relationships
Communications of the ACM - How the virtual inspires the real
Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Socialbilty
Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Socialbilty
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
Market, Hierarchy, and Trust: The Knowledge Economy and the Future of Capitalism
Organization Science
Information Systems Research
The experienced "sense" of a virtual community: characteristics and processes
ACM SIGMIS Database
Out of Sight, Out of Sync: Understanding Conflict in Distributed Teams
Organization Science
Resources in Emerging Structures and Processes of Change
Organization Science
HICSS '06 Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - Volume 08
Talk to me: foundations for successful individual-group interactions in online communities
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Journal of Management Information Systems
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
The Promise of Research on Open Source Software
Management Science
Organizational Boundaries and Theories of Organization
Organization Science
Enabling Customer-Centricity Using Wikis and the Wiki Way
Journal of Management Information Systems
Identification of Comment Authorship in Anonymous Group Support Systems
Journal of Management Information Systems
The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It
The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It
Materiality and change: Challenges to building better theory about technology and organizing
Information and Organization
Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts
Brokerage, Boundary Spanning, and Leadership in Open Innovation Communities
Organization Science
Information Technology and the Changing Fabric of Organization
Organization Science
Competition Among Virtual Communities and User Valuation: The Case of Investing-Related Communities
Information Systems Research
The Role of Narratives in Sustaining Organizational Innovation
Organization Science
A Dialogical Approach to the Creation of New Knowledge in Organizations
Organization Science
Factors affecting shapers of organizational wikis
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Network Exchange Patterns in Online Communities
Organization Science
Organizational Learning: From Experience to Knowledge
Organization Science
PERSPECTIVE---Collective Intelligence in the Organization of Science
Organization Science
Breaking news on wikipedia: dynamics, structures, and roles in high-tempo collaboration
Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work Companion
How does social software change knowledge management? Toward a strategic research agenda
The Journal of Strategic Information Systems
Organizing for Innovation in the Digitized World
Organization Science
"What's coming next?" Epistemic curiosity and lurking behavior in online communities
Computers in Human Behavior
The Journal of Strategic Information Systems
Hi-index | 0.00 |
Online communities (OCs) are a virtual organizational form in which knowledge collaboration can occur in unparalleled scale and scope, in ways not heretofore theorized. For example, collaboration can occur among people not known to each other, who share different interests and without dialogue. An exploration of this organizational form can fundamentally change how we theorize about knowledge collaboration among members of organizations. We argue that a fundamental characteristic of OCs that affords collaboration is their fluidity. This fluidity engenders a dynamic flow of resources in and out of the community---resources such as passion, time, identity, social disembodiment of ideas, socially ambiguous identities, and temporary convergence. With each resource comes both a negative and positive consequence, creating a tension that fluctuates with changes in the resource. We argue that the fluctuations in tensions can provide an opportunity for knowledge collaboration when the community responds to these tensions in ways that encourage interactions to be generative rather than constrained. After offering numerous examples of such generative responses, we suggest that this form of theorizing---induced by online communities---has implications for theorizing about the more general case of knowledge collaboration in organizations.