Characterization of the Freesound online community

Abstract

There are many online communities with member-generated and openly available multimedia content. Their success depends on having active contributing users and on producing useful content. With this criterion, the community of sound practitioners that has emerged in Freesound is a successful case of interest to be studied. But to understand it and support it further we need an appropriate analysis methodology. In this paper we propose some qualitative and quantitative approaches for its characterization, focusing on the analysis of organizational structure, shared goals, user interactions and vocabulary sharing. We think that the proposed approach can be applied to other online communities with similar characteristics. © 2012 IEEE.