BL4: Increasing participation in online communities: A framework for human–computer interaction. Jonathan Bishop

Online communities become more and more powerful tool for interacting among Internet-users. Over and above specific tools for communicating and sending mails to each other, chats and conference rooms, different kinds of websites where commenting is enabled (or other kind of TextField available for users filling in) can be used as site for interacting. The exsistense of such sites is always supported with communities of people who have similar goals, life experience, beliefs and values. In this paper two types of participants in such communities are considered:
- 'elders', active members of the community, regularly posting or answering questions of other participants;
- 'lurkers', passive members who never take participatory action but stay in observer-role.
It was suggested that reason for such division is hierarchical needs theory (Maslow, 1943). According to it, it was state that lurkers don't take action because community doesn/t provide them with needed security (basic) and psyhological needs and elders participate actively because their social and esteem needs are met. But the experience has shown that sometimes people can stay in community even skipping their needs in food and sleep. Then was suggested that reason for participation in community is goal-driven as opposed to needs-driven.
The author proposes 3-level framework suggesting that actions are linked to goals and tries to explain several questions not answered with needs-driven behaviour model.
Level 1 of the framework is made up of an actor’s desires. These are Social, Order, Existential, Vengeance and Creative. The main difference between this framework and needs-based theories is the concept that individuals are not needs driven, but driven by their desires to carry out actions. The five categories of desires presented in this framework are the desires that lead to the actions that are most likely to occur in online communities.
Level 2 of the model is made up of an actor’s cognitions – their goals, plans, values, beliefs and interests. Thus, lurker can avoid posting believing that his posts might be unhelpful or not intresting.
Level 3 of the model is made up of an actor’s means to interpret and interact with their environment. It is made up of haptic abilities, auditory abilities, visual, olfactoryvand gustatory.
The environment is made up of other actors, artefacts, and structures among other things. In this framework there are 3 principles:

1. An actor is driven to act by their desires

2. An actor’s desire to act is limited by their goals, plans, values, beliefs and interests

3.An actor will act based on how they perceive their environment

Encouraging participation is one of the greatest challenges for any online community provider. Active participation will make community flourishing. In order to do so lurkers should become active members too. To persuade them community proveders have to make an actor’s beliefs dissonant. Lurker may be persuaded to change their beliefs that lead them to experience temperance if they consider the community members suggesting they participate credibly and changing the belief would be consistent with the goals that they hold.
Developing systems that offer perceived affordances is another way of encouraging participation in online communities, as is engaging an actor in a state of flow, whereby they will experience intemperance or even deference. However, this may mean that individuals will act out less positive desires, such as vengeance, and flame other community members that offend them.