Online Communities Administration: Defining Tools for Different Profiles

Abstract

Abstract. There occur a great number of breakdowns in online communities caused by the natural gap between face-to-face and virtual relationships. In addition to this shortcoming, creating, managing and promoting participative online communities is frequently arduous work, and there usually are few tools to help the administrators through this endeavor. So, in this paper we present some results of a research carried out for the implementation of a tool for managing online communities called OriOnGroups, which aims to help in the administrator's decision-making when creating and managing communities. We introduce a categorization for communities profiles and make use of personas, which helped us to select different tools for each one of these profiles.