Synthetic definition and empirical references

One of the pioneer pieces of research employing the term virtual community can be found in a book with the same title written by Howard Rheingold and published in 1993. Nowadays, virtual community or online community is used broadly for a large variety of social groups interacting mainly via the Internet.

In the research, it is proposed the concept of online creation communities, instead of using the broad concept of online communities because with the concept of online creation communities, it is referred to a specific type of online community, i.e. the online community whose goal is knowledge-making.

In this first section in order to clarify from the beginning the phenomenon referring to, it is provided a broad synthetic definition of online creation community and then present empirical references.

Definition of Online Creation Community An Online Creation Community (OCC) refers to a collective action performed by a loosely integrated “network“ of people that, cooperate, communicate and interact, mainly via the Internet, with the common goal of knowledge-making, and engaged in alternative forms of knowledge management.

In this definition, the expression alternative forms of knowledge management refers to the absence of online or legal barriers to the circulation of information and knowledge (such as, Copyright restrictive licenses), and/or the promotion of less restrictive forms of information and knowledge management.

Empirically with online creations communities it is refereed to all these experiences:

• Development communities, that is communities developed around the free software programming, such as the communities around Apache, Linux, Debian, Drupal;
• Communities around not only technical knowledge or the creation of languages other than the software, led by the well known case of Wikipedia an online encyclopedia;
• Communities around the global movement or techno-political tools, like People’s Global Action – Global Archive or the Open e-library on social transformation that collects and classifies articles and materials on the themes covered by the social forums;
• Alternative media and mainstream media communities based on interactive mechanisms to allow media news generated by the people, in the alternative media with the classic case of Indymedia and in the mainstream media with examples like El Pais;
• the social networking communities, such as the case of You Tube (a website to archive, share and recommend home-made videos), My Space (where each person has their own page to present him or herself and interact with the others), and Flickr (a website to archive, share and comment on photos).
• Or Communities for scientific collaboration and the reclaiming of public science like the Public Library of Science (PloS).