Foster an implicit community based on a newsletter tracking system

Abstract

Communities have explored the virtual world as a tool to improve their communication. However, when the number of interactions was manageable in its face-to-face manner, the same was not true when the Internet became the main communicator. The number of interactions grows at a pace that is very hard for communities to control. As a consequence connections get lost or forgotten and communities lose the chance to perceive individuals' relations. It is in this gap that the "Newsletter Tracking System" (NTS) comes as an automatic tool that allows communities to capture connections between individuals through their interactions with newsletters. By storing the data on individuals' interactions, NTS discovers implicit connections between individuals and fosters an implicit community. In addition, it uses clustering algorithms to allow communities to better understand how individuals relate to each other and it proposes a "Connection Degree" model (CD) to measure the connections' strength among individuals. NTS and CD were developed and evaluated within Nano-Tera.ch scientific community. At the end, the results showed that implicit communities can be an advantage for real communities to better organize individuals, share knowledge, and promote teamwork. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.