Title:
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ENCOURAGING PARTICIPATION IN VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES: THE IT-SUMMIT-BLOG CASE |
Author(s):
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Justus Bross , Harald Sack , Christoph Meinel |
ISBN:
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ISSN: 1645-7641 |
Editors:
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Pedro Isaías |
Year:
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2007 |
Edition:
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V V,2 |
Keywords:
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E-Government, web 2.0, social media, E-Citizenship, web-based services, virtual community
participation, knowledge management, digital democracy |
Type:
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Journal Paper |
First Page:
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113 |
Last Page:
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129 |
Language:
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English |
Cover:
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Full Contents:
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click to dowload
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Paper Abstract:
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The first national IT-summit in Germany had the goal to communicate the common conviction and
objective target of the German government as well as economic and scientific organizations that
Germany is on its way to become the ICT-market number one worldwide. Critiques however soon
started to complain about the inaccurate representation of SMEs and the German public in general in the
planning phase, the event itself, and the follow up process of the IT-summit. The offline community of
the IT-summit was migrated into a virtual online counterpart the IT-summit-blog weblog. The
purpose of this approach was to improve the efficiency and ability to support the sharing of information
and knowledge in a very timely fashion about summit topics even among all those that could not
participate in the discussion yet. The collective knowledge generated out of this think tank is used by
reintegrating and using it in the follow-up-process as regards content of the summit. The case at hand
identifies the success factors needed to develop such a virtual communication platform.
The discussion is underplayed with a theoretical debate about the conceptual foundations concerning
virtual communities in general, and weblogs specifically. This discussion shows that no virtual
community is like another. Modern communication platforms need to be tailored towards the specific
need they were built for. This counts especially for weblogs as the sort of platform chosen for the project
at hand, as well as for the specific reason the platform was developed for namely the discussion of ITsummit-
topics. The need for control and moderation of user generated contributions conflicts with the
grass roots democracy concept of weblogs in general. Thus, the goal of this paper is to find the
appropriate standards, key issues, and requirements of a platform as envisioned by the summit
participants in order to form a coherent basis for the development of the IT-summit-blog. The
mismatch between the initial conception of the blog and the identified need for structural changes after 6
month of operations will also be highlighted. |
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