Predicting the integration of newcomers in OKBCs based on existing members' involvement

Abstract

Profiling online knowledge communities and determining their corresponding degree of newcomer integration based on existing members' involvement, posts and comments helps us better understand what drives the social trend and how knowledge is built nowadays. In this study we differentiate participation from collaboration, thus showing how opinion leaders emerge in a community. Therefore, while analyzing 10 integrative and 10 non-integrative communities, we quantitatively measure member involvement in terms of previously validated automated indices that are used for assessing participation and collaboration. Afterwards, we build automated methods of classifying communities based on their members' online behavior, thus being able to predict how likely new members will be integrated in the online community.