INFM 718J / LBSC 708P - October 20, 2005 - Practical Activity: Building a Taxonomy of Online Communities

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We are going to work on building a taxonomy of online communities for the practical activities section of October 20^th lecture. This document is intended to give you an overview of how the activity will take place, and how you can prepare for it.

We will first work on building a list of characteristics (or criteria) that will help us classify online communities. After that, we will define the classes under each criterion. We will use a “nominal group” type decision making process for these tasks.

• First, we will brainstorm for candidate criteria for the taxonomy.
• Once we run out of ideas for candidate criteria, we will sort them by voting. Everybody will vote for up to five criteria. We will decide for a cut-off point, and criteria above the cut-off will be taken to the next stage. Ideally, we will agree on 3-5 criteria.
• In the second stage of the activity, we will decide on classes under each criterion which we can use to classify online communities. We will use the same decision process we used in the first stage.

In order to be able to contribute to this activity, and to get the most out of it, please spend some time between now and October 20^th compiling your own list of criteria and classes under each criterion. The readings you have done so far, and the student presentations should help you think about a range of online communities. There are also two articles that you may wish to read (or skim), since they particularly focus on the issue of building a taxonomy of online communities. One of the articles (Stanoevska-Slabeva and Schmid, 2001) proposes a general typology of online communities, while the other (Lazar and Preece, 1998) introduces a set of four characteristics for classifying online communities. These two papers are available on the Course Documents section of BlackBoard.

Thanks in advance for contributing to this activity.

References:

1) Lazar, J. and J. Preece (1998). "Classification Schema for Online Communities." AMCIS - Americas Conference on Information Systems, August 14 - 16, 1998, Baltimore, MD.

2) Stanoevska-Slabeva, K. and B. F. Schmid (2001). "A Typology of Online Communties and Community Supporting Platforms." 34th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, January 3-6, 2001, Maui, HI.