A Model for Context in the Design of Open Production Communities

Abstract

Open production communities (OPCs) provide technical features and social norms for a vast but dispersed and diverse crowd to collectively accumulate content. In OPCs, certain mechanisms, policies, and technologies are provided for voluntary users to participate in community-related activities including content generation, evaluation, qualification, and distribution and in some cases even community governance. Due to the known complexities and dynamism of online communities, designing a successful community is deemed more an art than a science. Numerous studies have investigated different aspects of certain types of OPCs. Most of these studies, however, fall short of delivering a general view or prescription due to their narrow focus on a certain type of OPCs. In contribution to theories on technology-mediated social participation (TMSP), this study synthesizes the streams of research in the particular area of OPCs and delivers a theoretical framework as a baseline for adapting findings from one specific type of community on another. This framework consists of four primary dimensions, namely, platform features, content, user, and community. The corresponding attributes of these dimensions and the existing interdependencies are discussed in detail. Furthermore, a decision diagram for selecting features and a design guideline for “decontextualizing” findings are introduced as possible applications of the framework. The framework also provides a new and reliable foundation on which future research can extend its findings and prescriptions in a systematic way.