Dynamics of Forums

Forums represent a particularly common and efficient means of engaging large communities and enabling participation and contribution. Online archive resources have been created which enable researchers to visit websites exactly as they were at specific points in time. Many online community forums have been captured in Internet archives along with metrics that enable the development of these communities over time to be mapped. Of these, eight have been selected using convenience sampling. A summary of key characteristics of these forums is depicted in Table 12.

142 History Number of Threads Number of Posts

Forum Name No.

Measurements Earliest Record L-Camera Forum 17 2007 291,214 2,715,235 SDMB 19 2000 684,891 17,795,204 Coffee Snobs 19 2005 29,918 375,023 Rolex 23 2004 380,694 5,598,061 R1 Forum 38 2001 362,317 5,658,060 Atheist Foundation 14 2010 18,543 394,345 Arcade Controls 22 2004 132,123 1,474,336

Smith & Wesson 17 2009 338,188 3,607,219

169 2,237,888 37,617,483

Table 12: Archive measurement details for targeted online forum communities

The selection of forums for inclusion in this research was dictated by the availability of historical records to enable sufficient resolution of time series measurements, sufficient time in existence for the life-cycle to be adequately represented, sufficient number of threads to ensure granularity in the data, and sufficient number of posts for the sample to be considered representative of the overall population. Further, the communities were appropriately heterogenous with a good spread of size and focus. It is noted that the forums were all English language, and represented western cultures and this might represent a source of systematic bias.

Analysis of the data obtained from these archives revealed a number of interesting characteristics of online communities. Firstly, there was a significant instance of casual users across all of the platforms sampled. Casual usage is participation in forum discussions by individuals that have chosen not to register on the forum. Registration is almost always free and brings with it a range of benefits including ability to do searches on the board, receive email notifications of updates, and direct message other participants. Casual users are often precluded from these benefits. It is not unreasonable to suspect that casual users are interested in the forum topic, but not (yet) committed to regular contribution. As such they may share an

143 affiliation with the group without being considered a community member. On average across the platforms studied, casual participation at any given time was around four times that of member participation. The implication for organisations that use community registrations as a proxy for community size is that they are likely significantly understating the amount of interest they attract. Separating out quality contributions from mischievous or destructive activity (increasing the signal-to-noise ratio) is a concern when seeking to obtain quality data from un-moderated online sources. There is a significant cohort of casual visitors to forum that are not sufficiently committed to register but still have quality input to contribute. Barriers aimed at excluding ‘trolls’ will also likely preclude participation from these

uncommitted users.

Figure 16: Distribution of replies per thread, per forum

An additional insight was revealed through taking measurements of the number of forums hosted on a platform over time. Desktop data mining was undertaken using a web-based application called ImportIO. Changes in number of threads, replies and views were taken at intervals over the duration of the existence of the forums being analyzed. From these

144 summary measures were calculated and plotted to provide a visual reference for the movement in these values over time.

All platforms demonstrated a growth in membership over the first year or two often followed by a period of rationalisation or restructuring of the individual forums on those platforms. Wenger (Wenger, McDermott and Snyder, 2002) identified 5 stages of development of Virtual Communities of Practice (VCoP), which are summarised in Table 13. These correspond to the stages of evolution seen in development of online communities over time.

Stage Name Definition

1 Potential _{The formative stage where the potential for a CoP has} been identified and membership and administrative issues are addressed

2 Coalescing _{The CoP is launched, activities commence and the} emphasis lies in establishing value.

3 Maturing _{The CoP becomes established, core practice is well} defined, members know each other, the organisation develops a sense

4 Stewardship _{Managing the ongoing growth, development, structure and} appeal of the community

5 Transformation _{A precipitating event necessitating the need for dramatic} change and/or renewal

Table 13: Wenger’s Five Stages of Community Development (Wenger, 2002)

A final observation is that overall membership of online communities peaks and then inevitably declines. Whether the decline is a result of progressive restructuring of the site, or the factor that precipitates this restructure is a noteworthy consideration. One might conjecture that participants in the community simply evolve through the subject matter and beyond, that the marginal benefit from participation slowly diminishes until the effort required of membership exceeds the return (however defined) to the participant. The question remains why growth does not sustain as new members discover the community. Perhaps there are temporal relevance issues in online communities that fail to be addressed and as new platforms arise allegiances are switched.

145 6.19 Conclusion

The purpose of this research is to propose a conceptual model of online community development and management in the context of organisational value-creation.

online communities demonstrate distinct characteristics, and a deterministic and predictive model can be developed through integrating these typologies with other critical decision points in relation to choice of business model, platform stewardship, community type, participation mode and desired outcome.