Virtual communities Sample Clauses

Virtual communities. The digital DIY phenomenon – and more broadly the makers movement – can be surely conceptualized as a knowledge-building community, where innovation is put forward by individual’s curiosity as well as from an initial agenda and shared in the entire community for further knowledge production. Several concepts compete for understanding this phenomenon: knowledge networks, knowledge communities, communities of interest, communities of practice, etc. Technology, individual expertise and sharing – all common traits to DiDIY – have long been studied as communities of practice (e.g., Lave & Xxxxxx 1991; Xxxxx & Xxxxxx 1991), that in the strict, literal sense are communities that shares practices. These resemble both virtual platforms like Instructables, Xxxxxxxxxx.xxx, etc. as well as locally based communities of makers either temporary (e.g., Maker Fairs) or stable (e.g., fab labs or makerspaces), where knowledge is co- constructed and shared, through joint problem-solving. Following the perspective introduced at the MIT by Xxxxx (2006), our first sub-stream of research will focus on virtual communities. Virtual or on-line communities are groups whose members use ICT as the main means of communication (Cothrel & Xxxxxxxx 1999). They do not exclude using other interaction modes, in particular face-to-face or video conferencing, but the main distinction between real or virtual communities is technology-based interaction in the latter (see De Maggio, Gloor, and Passiante (2009) for a literature review on the topic). In an attempt to provide a systematic taxonomy of virtual communities, Xxxxx (2006) distinguished among three types of networks: • Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs): made up of self motivated people who share a common vision, meeting on the web to exchange ideas, knowledge, experiences and to work in a collaborative way to achieve a common goal; • Collaborative Interest Networks (CINs): composed of people who have the same interests but don’t perform a common work in a virtual team; this kind of community is very frequent on the web, has a lot of silent members, who keep information from web sites, portals, forum, and a few active members who are inclined to share their knowledge and experiences within the community; • Collaborative Learning Networks (CLNs): a community made of people inclined to share knowledge and practice to benefit reciprocally from personal mastery and the collective knowledge accumulation of a group of attitudinally simila...

Virtual communities. As pointed out by Xxxxx and Xxxxxxx [37], the effects of advanced information technologies on community are still to be understood in their full complexity and hence call for further systematic research.