Title :
Social capital and volunteerism in virtual communities: the case of the Internet Chess Club
Author :
Ginsburg, Mark ; Weisband, Suzanne
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Manage. Inf. Syst., Arizona Univ., Tucson, AZ, USA
Abstract :
Considers the theory of social capital and volunteerism in an online gaming community, the Internet Chess Club (ICC). We discuss how increased social capital provides broad classes of benefits to the participants of the network and suggest how volunteerism can be expected to increase the social capital of a network. We present survey data collected from 62 members of ICC to examine how different types of online volunteers are recruited and work in a successful virtual community. We show that ICC volunteers encourage and enable intense interaction for the benefit of all the membership subgroups. That is, volunteers create social capital and serve as a key asset of the ICC business model; they strengthen both the ICC core business tenets and improve the software features it can offer to members, thereby providing the key to one virtual community´s business success.
Keywords :
Internet; computer games; social aspects of automation; societies; Internet Chess Club; business model; business success; case study; core business tenets; intense interaction; membership subgroups; network participants; online gaming community; online volunteer recruitment; social capital; software features; survey; virtual communities; volunteerism; Advertising; Autism; Computer aided software engineering; Diseases; Electronic commerce; Internet; Power generation economics; Recruitment; Social network services; Yarn;
Conference_Titel :
System Sciences, 2002. HICSS. Proceedings of the 35th Annual Hawaii International Conference on
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-1435-9
DOI :
10.1109/HICSS.2002.994152