Information and Knowledge Management using ArcGIS ModelBuilder

Giovanni Camponovo
By examining empirical paper in three types of communities (communities of practice, open source
communities and wireless communities), this paper found that motivations are diverse both within and
across communities. In particular, while empirical results of papers are somewhat heterogeneous –
namely because of the large number of reference theories employed (see section 3.1) and thus often
focusing only on a subset of potentially relevant motivations supported by the chosen reference
theory – some general observations can be made. Firstly it appears that the importance of extrinsic
rewards is more important in hybrid communities supported by a firm (this can be seen in wireless
communities and, to a lesser extent, in communities of practices). Secondly, it appears that members
often are motivated by a combination of different motivation that reinforce each other such as
satisfying personal needs (which triggers usage of the community) as well as social and psychological
needs (which also favor a more active contribution).
Of course this paper has some limitations in that it only focuses on empirical studies (thus neglecting
to do proper justice to the vast amount of more theoretical papers) and only considers three types of
virtual communities. It might therefore be interesting to extend this work to pure relationship
communities such as social networks, entertainment communities such as gaming and user
generated content communities (e.g. video and photo communities), commercial communities (e.g.
social shopping sites, buyer groups, brand communities) as well as peer-to-peer networks.
We hope that this work makes a bit of order in the existing research and stimulates further research.
We feel that it is especially important to extend existing research in three directions: 1) make an effort
to avoid an excessive proliferation of reference theoretical models by comparing, integrating and
consolidating reference theories, which would permit both a better evaluation of competing theories
as well as a better comparability of results across studies; 2) better understand the impact of many
contextual factors that could help explain the heterogeneity of results across the different studies both
within and across the various types of community and 3) expand the research about communities
within and across of different types of communities.
Acknowledgment
This paper has been supported by a research project financed by the Swiss National Science
Foundation under grant number 100014-127006.
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