Communities är ett hett ämne som idag ständigt diskuteras i media. Människor blir mer och mer benägna att interagera online och mängden med online communities ökar i takt med detta. I Sverige finns en community som heter Lunarstorm som har blivit ett fenomen som inte har skådats någon annanstans. Med sina 1,3 miljoner användare är det absolut störst i Sverige idag. Jag har i min uppsats tagit fram ett antal faktorer ur litteraturen som är avgörande för ett online communities framgång. Jag har även gjort en empirisk studie av företaget Lunarstorm och webbplatsen Lunarstorm. Jag har sedan i analysen använt mig av framgångsfaktorerna för att kunna dra slutsatser om hur Lunarstorm har kunnat bli ett sådant fenomen. Det som har framkommit av undersökningarna är att det framför allt är tre faktorer som har givit Lunarstorm den plats i rampljuset som det har idag, nätverkseffekter, att vara först, att de har skapat ett helt koncept och inte bara är en webbplats. / Online communities are today widely discussed in media and a very popular subject. People all around the world are more and more willing to interact online and the number of online communities are rising with this. Today we have a community in Sweden that is called Lunarstorm, this has become a phenomen not seen anywhere else. Whit its 1,3 million users, it is the absolut biggest in Sweden today. I have in my essay found a number of factors in the litteratur that are essential for an online communities succes. I have also done an empirical study on Lunarstorm as a company and Lunarstorm as a webbsite. I have then in my analys part applyed my success factors on Lunarstorm, to be able to make conclusions about why Lunarstorm have become such a success. What I can see from my researches there is especially three things that makes Lunarstorm speciell, and that is networkeffects, to be the first one and the entire koncept of Lunarstorm.

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In many online communities, users reveal innovative and potentially valuable intellectual property (IP) under conditions that entail the risk of theft and imitation. Where there is rivalry and formal IP law is not effective, this would lead to underinvestment or withholding of IP, unless user-organized norms compensate for these shortcomings. This study is the first to explore the characteristics and functioning of such a norms-based IP system in the setting of anonymous, large-scale, and loose-knit online communities. In order to do so, we use data on the Threadless crowdsourcing community obtained through netnography, a survey, and a field experiment. On this basis, we identify an integrated system of well-established norms that regulate the use of IP within this community. We analyze the system's characteristics and functioning, and we find that the "legal certainty" it provides is conducive to cooperation, cumulative effects, and innovation. We generalize our findings from the case by developing propositions aimed to spark further research. These propositions focus on similarities and differences between norms-based IP systems in online and offline settings, and the conditions that determine the existence of norms-based IP systems as well as their form and effectiveness in online communities. In this way, we contribute to the literatures on norms-based IP systems and online communities and offer advice for the management of crowdsourcing communities.

Thesis advisor: Ted Gaiser / This study explores the alteration of gossip as a result of new technology. Specifically, this study examines the social implications of Facebook, a popular social networking website, on college students using the Boston College undergraduate population as a lens to study the college student population in general. Drawing from the theories of Simmel, Mead, and Goffman, and others, I outline how college students present themselves on Facebook’s online environment. I employed a mixed-method research approach, collecting data from a survey of Boston College undergraduates and, subsequently, conducting a series of in-depth face-to-face interviews in order to gain an understanding of how Facebook altered the social scene and, specifically, how Facebook affects gossip. Facebook is a communication tool widely used by college students in order to present themselves online and maintain relationships. I found that due to the pervasive nature of Facebook, in junction with the simplicity of posting information about oneself and others on Facebook, an important shift occurs in which private matters are publicized to a large audience. This shift facilitates the flow of gossip amongst college students. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology Honors Program. / Discipline: Sociology.

Among various fan sites dedicated to pop stars, GagaDaily is one prominent online collective that centers around Lady Gaga. This study is a piece of ethnographic research focused on two claims – GagaDaily constitutes a Community of Practice (Eckert, 2006) in an online setting, and the regular use of humor by users fulfills social and pragmatic roles in the discourse. Communicative phenomena (both textual and graphic) that characterize the linguistic repertoire of GagaDaily members were catalogued from the first 100 pages of one thread within the forums. These data were grouped into categories corresponding to different dimensions of language use as well as media/literary devices. Alongside a quantitative analysis of various tokens and types of data, a qualitative examination of selected excerpts from the sample confirm the veracity of the two main claims. When analyzed with regard to Wenger’s definition of a Community of Practice (Wenger, 2009), GagaDaily meets all three of his requirements. Likewise, the analysis of humor reveal that GagaDaily users regularly engage in the first dichotomy of the tactics of intersubjectivity, adequation and distinction (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004) and incorporate GIF images in their humor to express their alignment with stance objects (DuBois, 2007) and other members.

Background Young people constitute a fast growing group of Internet users and they are considered an important market segment. In Sweden, on average nearly 97 % of the people between the ages of 15-19 use Internet every day. A great deal of these people use online communities, and in order for these communities to succeed, it is vital to understand what content the youths perceive as valuable and useful. Furthermore, since using an online community takes time and effort, the community should fulfil a need among its users. Since it is no easy task to understand what motivates consumers, online communities should strive to reach a consensus in common characteristics among these individuals, in terms of what needs and wants they seek to satisfy in online communities. Purpose         The purpose of this thesis is to explore what needs and wants youths in Sweden seek to satisfy in online communities. To demonstrate the findings, Ungdomar.se will be evaluated, and given recommendations accordingly.  Method          In order to fulfil the purpose of this thesis, a descriptive and explorative study was conducted, consisting of both quantitative and qualitative data. The collection of data was made through a survey among youths, and by semi-structured interviews with Ungdomar.se and two people working at the Youth Centre Brunnen. Conclusion The authors have identified a set of needs and wants, that youths seek to satisfy in online communities. This has further been applied to the online community Ungdomar.se, and they have been provided with recommendations on how to satisfy these needs and wants.

Online communities thrive on their members participation and contributions. Continuous encouragement of participation of these members is vital for an online community. Social visualizations are one of the methods to make members explicitly aware of their connections and relationships. There are numerous ways to visually represent information, current-status, power, and acceptance of members in an online community. In this thesis I present a design of a visualization representing the evolving reciprocity of relationships among users based on the comments they give to each others posts. The purpose of the visualization is to emphasize and hopefully trigger a common bond in the community and thereby increase their participation. We developed and deployed the visualization in an online community called WISETales where women in science and engineering share personal stories. We also deployed modified and improved versions of the visualization in two other communities, I-Help class discussion forums and the Vegatopia discussion forum for vegetarians. In this thesis we present the results of the evaluation in these three communities. The results unfortunately, were negative. Even though separate explanations for the lack of motivational effect can be found in each of the experiments, it seems that the chosen motivational approach was too gentle to encourage participation. It seems for reciprocation to take place, the users need to be committed to the community and already have some other underlying motivation to participate actively. The visualization also should provide some new information that they werent aware of previously. This was not the case with the users in the three chosen communities. WISETales was too new and can barely be called a community. I-Help was not a community, but a place for student to post questions for the teacher to answer. Vegatopia, in contrast, is well established, active community, where people know each other, and engage in conversations with each other. The visualization did not provide any new information for them that they didnt know and only served as a brief attraction for a day (novelty effect). We are still optimistic, however, that the visualization may be useful for active and too dynamic communities where people are unaware of their social relationships because they are too many, for example, social network sites like Twitter.

The increasing demand towards products and services that perfectly matches the customer needs is evident, so the manufacturing trends are aiming to produce small unit of customized product in large total volumes. The advances in manufacturing and information technologies provided great opportunities to achieve cost-effective mass customization. The purpose of this study was to have a holistic view on under-standing how entrepreneurs in small companies employ and effectively manage mass customization realization. The focus was placed in identifying what are the major factors that influence successful mass customization, how available technologies are enabling this process and how companies achieve value co-creation with the customers. In order to study the practical implementation of mass customization four case studies have been conducted. The information gathered was categorized and the preliminary theoretical framework was used as a template to compare the empirical results. The results show that every strategy for mass customization has to be customizes according to the particular product/service, market, customers, and the available technology for cost efficient implementation of mass customization. In a mass customization system value co-creation is achieved by direct customer integration and is benefiting from economies of integration. The challenge is to balance the system to the right degree, so socially and technologically efficient environment can bring higher value for the customers and better business opportunities for the companies. / This Master Thesis project has been carried out as part of "Production Development and Management" Program at JTH and "Information Technology and Management" program at JIBS.

Online communities thrive on their members participation and contributions. Continuous encouragement of participation of these members is vital for an online community. Social visualizations are one of the methods to make members explicitly aware of their connections and relationships. There are numerous ways to visually represent information, current-status, power, and acceptance of members in an online community. In this thesis I present a design of a visualization representing the evolving reciprocity of relationships among users based on the comments they give to each others posts. The purpose of the visualization is to emphasize and hopefully trigger a common bond in the community and thereby increase their participation. We developed and deployed the visualization in an online community called WISETales where women in science and engineering share personal stories. We also deployed modified and improved versions of the visualization in two other communities, I-Help class discussion forums and the Vegatopia discussion forum for vegetarians. In this thesis we present the results of the evaluation in these three communities. The results unfortunately, were negative. Even though separate explanations for the lack of motivational effect can be found in each of the experiments, it seems that the chosen motivational approach was too gentle to encourage participation. It seems for reciprocation to take place, the users need to be committed to the community and already have some other underlying motivation to participate actively. The visualization also should provide some new information that they werent aware of previously. This was not the case with the users in the three chosen communities. WISETales was too new and can barely be called a community. I-Help was not a community, but a place for student to post questions for the teacher to answer. Vegatopia, in contrast, is well established, active community, where people know each other, and engage in conversations with each other. The visualization did not provide any new information for them that they didnt know and only served as a brief attraction for a day (novelty effect). We are still optimistic, however, that the visualization may be useful for active and too dynamic communities where people are unaware of their social relationships because they are too many, for example, social network sites like Twitter.

In the era of knowledge economy, more and more people view online communities of practice (CoPs) as wellspring of precious knowledge. Interestingly, many researchers support the notion that CoPs must develop over time; they are not designed or made but grown, however, there is no systematic theory of online community development (Matzat, 2003). Furthermore, when changes with time are specialized concerned, several questions regarding CoPs development remain unanswered. Since online CoPs are formed by groups of people, existing group development models may provide valuable lens for us to understand the driving forces behind. Nevertheless, drawn on the autotrophic and open system of online CoPs, there exist several differences between traditional groups and online CoPs, such as self-select membership, high member fluidity, impossible to know all members in a large member base, unlimited life spans, and no given tasks have to complete. Furthermore, some defects in prior group development studies are also identified. To answer the research question and avoid problems identified in prior group development studies, this study plans to conduct a longitudinal exploratory study on three online CoPs lasting at least three years by overcoming the defects of unreal subjects such as experimental student groups or arranged tasks. Besides, three years of longitudinal study may prevent from the bias drawn from single snapshot and limited life span. Furthermore, we decide to adopt the ecological perspective for several reasons: First, the evolutionary process is akin to the central theme of ecological theory. Therefore the mechanisms of change can be suitably inferred from ecological perspective. Moreover, the ecological perspective is more holistic and macroscopic, and accordingly the problem of high individual member fluidity can be easily tackled. Second, many ecological concepts are used in numerous CoPs-related literatures to describe CoPs. In addition, being immersed in some CoPs for several years, we found that members usually use some ecological terms to describe their CoPs or other members. Third, several studies indicated that the ecological approach provides a powerful framework for understanding complex human social issues. We view each CoP as an ecosystem because ecosystem is the lowest level in the ecological hierarchy that is complete with all the necessary components for function and survival over the long term. This research also adopts the multiple case study approach. Firstly, online CoPs are categorized based on group member interaction statistics. Three categories of online CoPs are identified and three online CoP belonging to these three categories, respectively, are selected as representative cases. Every six months the aggregated data of targeted online CoPs are treating as the unit of analysis. The whole 'lives' of online CoPs under study are analyzed, by the way to avoid the problems of zero-history groups and drawn bias conclusion from observation of groups over different time periods. We attempted to detect and analyze the changes of community structures in the ecosystem using social network analysis tools. Moreover, since quantitative data may fail to capture some interaction modes, this study employs content analysis and semi-structural interviews as complementary vehicles to gain insights into the detailed evolutionary process. Finally, this dissertation follows Yin's (1994) analytic strategy of descriptive framework, and thus uses the metaphor of an ecosystem to integrate and organize sets of dimensions in relation to the evolutionary process of online CoPs. Drawn on Odum¡¦s (1971, 1983, 1993) model of ecosystem, this study proposes a descriptive framework based on ecosystem ecology and network analysis. There are primarily three components: organisms, energy, and nutrients; three types of connections: interactive network, keystone structure, and roles distribution. There are also five categories of constraints on the ecosystem functioning. They serve as dimensions of describing changes within an ecosystem over time. Further, these changes are interpreted from ecological perspectives, where insights into the mechanism governing the development process are generated to postulate the development model of online CoPs.