Portholes: supporting awareness in a distributed work group
CHI '92 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Lurker demographics: counting the silent
Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Visualization components for persistent conversations
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Increasing participation in online communities: A framework for human-computer interaction
Computers in Human Behavior
UnaWare: supporting tacit design knowledge exchange
International Journal of Web Based Communities
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In this study, we focus on participants called lurkers, who do not post any messages in an online community such as interactive mailing lists and bulletin board systems. We propose a method of classifying participants including lurkers based on two criteria: what types of actions they take outside the online community, and whether or not the online community affects their thoughts. We conduct a questionnaire survey of all participants in two in-house online communities to verify our method. There are a considerable number of lurkers who have a strong and wide influence outside the online community. We conclude that such lurkers cannot be neglected in an evaluation of online communities within a company. These results could also lead us to discuss a possibility of an online community management by focusing on not only posters but also lurkers who are indirect contributors to increasing the influence of an online community on its outside environment.