Empowering Online Communities to Manage Change - How to Build Viable Organisations Online

The World Wide Web is witnessing an explosion in new forms of online community. These are built on advances in Web content posting, social networks and the wisdom of crowds. However, we are still largely ignorant about the factors that enable online communities to react successfully to change. Change can involve a number of things: swings in membership and levels of engagement; the emergence of internal conflicts; changing relationships with other online communities and offline organisations; and increasingly, changes caused by new computer-mediated communication technology.