Towards successful virtual communities

Abstract

With the multiplication of communication medium, the increasing multi-partner global organizations,the remote working tendencies,dynamic teams, pervasive or ubiquitous computing Virtual Communities (VCs) are playing an increasing role in social organizations currently and will probably change profoundly the way people interact in the future. In this paper, we present our position on the key characteristics that are imperative to provide a successful VC as well as the future directions in terms of research, development and implementation. We identify three main aspects (business, techniques and social) and analyze for each of them the different components and their relationships. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.