The roles and effects of active lurking in in-house online communities

This study examines the possibility of evaluating the value of an online community by focusing on the actions of participants on the outside of an online community. We call these kinds of actions ‘active lurking’. We conducted a questionnaire of participants in two discussion lists (DLs) in one manufacturing company, and classified active lurking into three types: ‘active lurking for practical use,’ ‘active lurking for propagation,’ and ‘active lurking for personal contact.’ We conducted semi-structured interviews with participants who have an experience of each active lurking. We coded the transcripts of interview in terms of what kind of information they took from their active lurking, why they did active lurking without sending a message to an online community, what is the effect of active lurking they did. Based on the results, we found that each type of active lurking has different roles and effects in an online community. We consider that it could be important for managers or coordinators of an online community to consider which roles and effects of active lurking are necessary to achieve the purpose of the online community.

http://www.mit.edu/~aero/papers/hcii05-takahashi_et_al.pdf