Content in open production communities: taxonomy and design construct providing a taxonomy and conceptualizing a construct to address content and content-related activites

Open production communities (OPCs) are online communities in which content is solely generated by users and is publicly available for everyone. By leveraging the manpower and collective intelligence of a vast crowd, these communities facilitate gleaning, structuring, evaluating and sharing information from different perspectives and in different areas of interest. Content, as “the king” in OPCs, has been loosely modeled and defined in the literature. Observing the lack of a standard and generalized terminology in the field of production communities in general and in content-related activities in particular, this paper introduces a fine-grained taxonomy for OPCs and a novel representational construct to resolve inconsistencies based on the existing theories and approaches. The results will establish a standard vocabulary and a unified construct for content to be used by researchers and community designers in this growing field of study.