The Roles of Information Seeking Dynamics in Sustaining the Community Participation

Many studies of online community have striven to understand how to sustain the member participation in the community. However, few have approached the problem of community sustainability from the information-seeking point of view. In this paper, we study 59 academic communities over five years and discover the significant information-seeking oriented factors associated with the viability of the conference community. By analyzing the twitter communications through the channel of information seeking around the conference and conducting regression analyses, we find that how people seek information and how they are responded are essential to maintaining the attraction of the newcomers as well as the retention of existing members in the community. Specifically, there is a discrepancy in the associations between the concentration, both in terms of information-seeking types and their participants of information seeking and responding, and the community's sustainability. Our research has analytical contributions to the sustainability of the online communities.