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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the richness of information and the satisfaction of participants in an online community regarding archive management in Taiwan.

An investigation was deployed to attendants in 20 training courses created by the National Archives Administration (NAA) in Taiwan for records staff on the topic of digital preservation. The responses were collected from respondents who were participating in an online community for archive management. Through structural equation modeling method, this study examined the effects of channel richness, information transparency and accessibility of archive to brand image and trust and then continued to the satisfaction of professional participants to archive management in an online community.

Appropriate disclosure of information regarding archiving can effectively improve the satisfaction of participants in the online community to archive. Channel richness of communication, information transparency and accessibility of archive significantly affect the brand image of archive and the trust of participants to archivists and finally affect the satisfaction of participants in the online community towards archive management.

The larger the amount of information exchanged, the more the trust among participants and the better brand image of the archives. The more trust and brand image exists among participants, the more satisfaction they will obtain from archive management.

The results can provide a strategic direction for managers of the national archive and the online community in government agencies to allocate resources for enhancing the information richness and the image of archive as well as achieving the satisfaction of participants in the professional community.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and illustrate how organizations may use online communities strategically to adapt to a changing business environment, specifically from a dynamic capabilities perspective.

The paper presents empirical evidence from three cases.

Online communities may help organizations to adapt to a changing business environment by allowing them to sense opportunities and threats, seize opportunities and reconfigure organizational assets.

The paper contributes to both the strategy and the information systems literatures by providing empirical insights into the strategic use of online communities.

The results of the paper are relevant for managers, helping them to understand the strategic role online communities (may) play and illustrating ways to use them accordingly.

The paper addresses a previously defined gap in the literature and provides novel empirical evidence. As online communities become integral parts of digital strategy and open innovation initiatives, the paper is both timely and relevant.

With gaining popularity, online communities are increasing. It is leading to the data and information overflow. So, there are some challenges like cyber frauds, cyberbullying, etc. while engaging with online communities. Not only this, anonymity of the participants, stress and racism are also big challenges in online communities' interaction. Online harassers' attack tactics have changed over time. In addition, there are challenges like quality of discussion, inequality in participation of the users, etc. may scale online communities towards incitement and activism. Therefore, this study will try to analyse these challenges for overall benefit of the society.

The underlying fuzzy set theory is employed to handle the fuzziness of users' perceptions since the attributes are expressed in linguistic preferences. Through exhaustive literature review, the authors have identified 15 challenges. These challenges are further categorised as cause and effect by using DEMATEL (Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory) approach.

Lack of strategic planning and uninspired discussions between users has emerged as a major challenge in cause category. This study further demonstrates how individual challenge can be managed and developed to navigate the online communities to maintain a healthy environment in society.

Results are based on limited dataset. Therefore, findings cannot be generalised for all online communities.

The research findings offer a suitable direction to policymakers to formulate and design policies, laws and regulations to increase user engagement in the online community. The study is beneficial to firms and researchers in understanding the factors influencing effective management of online communities.

In an era where complex technological advances increasingly govern service delivery, it is incumbent on service firms to pioneer innovative strategies to sustain customer engagement and cultivate loyalty. This conceptual paper examines the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in the realm of online customer communities, with a particular focus on its creation, management and enhancement facets. The authors explore how AI can revolutionize the dynamics of customer interaction, feedback mechanisms and overall engagement within the service industry.

This conceptual paper draws from marketing and management literature focusing on customer communities and AI in service and customer engagement contexts with a robust future research agenda.

A classification of online customer community engagement is provided along with a conceptual framework to guide our understanding of the integration of AI into online customer communities.

This exploration underscores the imperative for service firms to embrace AI-driven approaches to online customer community management, not only as a means to optimize their operations but as a vital strategy to stay competitive in the ever-evolving digital landscape. This paper examines the novel combination of AI with online customer communities and provides the framework in the form of an input-process-output (IPO) model for future research into this integration.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how decisions of managers and administrators of online communities on norms and rules affect the sense of virtual community (SOVC), which is an important factor of the quality of online information.

The study followed a two-level research design based on 970 online community members, nested within 36 online communities. Data collection consisted of two stages: first a web survey of a sample of online community members was conducted, followed by a web survey of administrators of the same online communities. A two-level hierarchical regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses.

The empirical results suggest that prominence of rules under the condition of members’ participation in their creation, presence of reputation mechanisms, and content moderation contribute significantly to the SOVC , while presence of lighter sanctions and interactive moderation do not.

Since this study is based on web forums, the validity of the proposed hypotheses for other types of online communities cannot be firmly established. Additional elements of online community management could be considered for a stronger system-level explanation of the SOVC.

The study demonstrates that online community administrators need to be considerate in creating and enforcing norms, as their decisions have an impact on the SOVC and consequently on the quality of online information.

The literature considers many factors of the SOVC but none of the previous studies have considered how community management is associated with this phenomenon.

This paper aims to add to the understanding of knowledge sharing in online communities through an investigation of the relationship between individual participant’s motivations and management in open source software (OSS) communities. Drawing on a review of literature concerning knowledge sharing in organisations, the factors that motivate participants to share their knowledge in OSS communities, and the management of such communities, it is hypothesised that the quality of management influences the extent to which the motivations of members actually result in knowledge sharing.

To test the hypothesis, quantitative data were collected through an online questionnaire survey of OSS web developers with the aim of gathering respondents’ opinions concerning knowledge sharing, motivations to share knowledge and satisfaction with the management of OSS projects. Factor analysis, descriptive analysis, correlation analysis and regression analysis were used to explore the survey data.

The analysis of the data reveals that the individual participant’s satisfaction with the management of an OSS project is an important factor influencing the extent of their personal contribution to a community.

Little attention has been devoted to understanding the impact of management in OSS communities. Focused on OSS developers specialising in web development, the findings of this paper offer an important original contribution to understanding the connections between individual members’ satisfaction with management and their motivations to contribute to an OSS project. The findings reveal that motivations to share knowledge in online communities are influenced by the quality of management. Consequently, the findings suggest that appropriate management can enhance knowledge sharing in OSS projects and online communities, and organisations more generally.

The purpose of this study sets out to examine (1) how have conflicts been conceptualized and operationalized within the context of online consumption communities? (2) what are the main conflict management, resolution strategies and frameworks that have been identified? and (3) what are the gaps in the relevant body of work in terms of theoretical and methodological dimensions, and what implications do they have for future research.

This study adopts a systematic and multidisciplinary literature review of online conflicts. Following a descriptive and thematic content analysis, it examines 79 peer-reviewed scholarly articles of the past 20 years within 6 scientific databases.

The authors propose a literature-based conceptualization of online conflicts and a multi-level conflict resolution matrix based on the different governance structures and social control mechanisms investigated in extant research.

The originality of this study lies in the integrative and interdisciplinary view of online conflict in global consumption communities.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate to which extent the concept of communities of practice (CoPs) can be applied to online communities and to explore how organizations can better utilize online social structures for their knowledge management practice.

A case study was used to examine an online community with the practice‐and‐identity framework that characterizes conventional CoPs. Qualitative data analysis was conducted primarily on 7,853 messages downloaded from the online community during a six week period.

The results showed how an online community could manifest the practice and identity characteristics of conventional CoPs as community members actively engaged in their shared practice and identity development while pursuing a joint enterprise. Research limitations/implications – The study was conducted in a single Chinese online community on traveling, which may limit the generalizability of the findings.

This study suggested how organizations can nurture online CoPs. In addition, a hierarchical model was proposed to help organizations identify the appropriate online social structure for their knowledge management purposes. Originality/value – This study empirically verified that CoPs can emerge from online communities and demonstrated that the concept of CoPs can be used to guide knowledge sharing and knowledge creation in online environments.

This study aims to explore the different effects of inter-community group networks and intra-community group networks on group innovation.

The authors used a pooled panel dataset of 12,111 self-organizing innovation groups in 463 game product creative workshop communities from Steam support to test the hypothesis. The pooled ordinary least squares (OLS) model is used for analyzing the data.

The results show that network constraint is negatively associated with the innovation performance of online groups. The average path length of the inter-community group network negatively moderates the relationship between network constraint and group innovation, while the average path length of the intra-community group network positively moderates the relationship between network constraint and group innovation. In addition, both the network density of inter-community group networks and intra-community group networks can negatively moderate the negative relationship between network constraint and group innovation.

The findings of this study suggest that network structural characteristics of inter-community networks and intra-community networks have different effects on online groups’ product innovation, and therefore, group members should consider their inter- and intra-community connections when choosing other groups to form a collaborative innovation relationship.

The literature lacks knowledge on how organizations can manage trolling behaviors in online communities. Extant studies tend to either focus on user responses to trolling behaviors (i.e. a micro-level perspective) or how the trolling infrastructure is governed by platforms (i.e. a macro-level perspective), paying less attention to the organizational community host. With more organizations hosting online communities on social media networks and trolling behaviors increasingly disrupting user engagement within these communities, the current understanding of trolling management practices has become inapt. Given the commercial and social damage caused by trolling behaviors, it is important to understand how these can be best managed. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to examine the meso-level perspective of trolling management by focusing on organizational practice.

The research design consists of an in-depth non-participatory netnography based on a case study of PETA’s (“People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals”) Facebook community.

Six distinct trolling management strategies are identified and categorized by their direct versus indirect communication approach: non-engaging, educating, bolstering, expurgating, asserting and mobilizing. Some strategies are deemed to be more successful than others in generating positive community outcomes such as reduced trolling frequency or further support from like-minded community members.

The findings contribute to the meso-level perspective in the trolling management literature by introducing a novel, empirically informed typology of organizational trolling management strategies.