Community life-cycle management framework based on a community maturity model for sustainable web communities

Abstract

The Web Community has become an important social medium that allows users to participate in building social relationships and collaboratively conducting group activities while overcoming geographical barriers. However, there are a number of challenges to be faced before Web communities can become sustainable and so that members of these communities can continuously and consistently participate in community activities. First, recognizing the maturity of a Web community and making an appropriate decision to perform management functions are difficult for a leader. In addition, it is challenging for a leader to identify the relationship between actual data available from a community and the factors to evaluate community maturity. Next, managing the coherence of the content of a community is difficult due to the unbalanced distribution of the interests of the members, especially when their numbers are increasing. Finally, community operations cannot be related to management acts of the leader owing to the ambiguity of sustainable community operations within community maturity and the stages the communities are experiencing. This paper proposes a Web community life-cycle management framework that provides guidance to manage a Web community successfully based on a Web community life-cycle and its maturity model. The main goal of this approach is to help community leaders lead their communities to a sustainable stage. The proposed framework is evaluated using four case studies that formed in Web 2.0 environments to analyze the feasibility of recognizing the stages of community life-cycles and the relationships between community operations and maturity.