Evaluating the Informational and Social Aspects of Participation in Online Communities.

This paper aims at showing how beneficial it is to use an analysis grid as a guide to evaluate the dynamics of an online community and, on the basis of this grid, to develop agent-based models to explore each of the dimensions characterizing online communities within this grid. Several models from different perspectives have been proposed to study the dynamics of online communities (socio-technical perspective, life stages perspective...). In this paper, we consider two dimensions to evaluate them: the informational one and the social one. Their constituents are derived from an empirical analysis and a review of the literature on online communities and reputation. Keywords: methodology, analysis grid, agent-based models, online communities, participation, informational aspects, social aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]