Audience-specific online community design
Communications of the ACM - Supporting community and building social capital
Online communities: focusing on sociability and usability
The human-computer interaction handbook
A life-cycle perspective on online community success
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
Generating a sense of community in a graduate educational setting through persuasive technology
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Persuasive Technology
Older adults' perceptions and experiences of online social support
Interacting with Computers
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Demographic groups normally do not constitute communities. However, they have the potential for becoming online communities when individuals share common interests, needs and goals for problem solving and support and when they can easily find and communicate with each other and establish relationships. People in these demographic groups may be highly resistant to interacting online despite their regular use of the Internet for information gathering and email. The causes for this resistance, suggestions for mitigating it and approaches for bringing such demographic groups into online community environments and sustaining their online interaction are presented in this paper which describes a study of a demographic group of mid-life career changers. Suggested improvements in online community sociability and usability are recommended for these demographic groups to successfully interact online. In particular, the sociability and usability requirements of these demographic groups should direct the selection and implementation of technology.