Environmental jolts: Impact of exogenous factors on online community participation

Aditya Johri, Oded Nov, Raktim Mitra

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Few studies of online communities take exogenous factors into account while explaining community participation. We present preliminary results from a study investigating the impact of steward companies' actions on online community participation. We identified two events: (1) open sourcing of Java by Sun and (2) acquisition of Sun (and consequently of Java) by Oracle, and examined participation in their developer online communities. We found significant change in participation levels around each event with both significant increases and decreases. We conjecture that participation increased if the action was perceived as supportive by developers (e.g. Sun's open sourcing of Java) whereas it decreased if the action was perceived as detrimental by developers (e.g. Oracle's acquisition of Sun).

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the ACM 2011 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW 2011
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages649-652
Number of pages4
ISBN (Print)9781450305563
DOIs
StatePublished - 2011
EventACM 2011 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW 2011 - Hangzhou, China
Duration: Mar 19 2011Mar 23 2011

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW

Other

OtherACM 2011 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW 2011
Country/TerritoryChina
CityHangzhou
Period3/19/113/23/11

Keywords

  • Design
  • Environmental jolts
  • Online communities
  • Open source
  • Participation

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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