Research
Since 1995, my main research interest has been the evolution of virtual communities, in particular collaborative communities in which people work together to achieve common goals: what are the drivers of their growth? what are useful classifications of communities and their lifecycles? how to design effective socio-technical systems, balancing the complex, evolving norms and workflows of communities of human beings with the affordances and constraints of the myriad tools available through the Internet. Recently, my work has been expanding into the (im)possibilities of virtual worlds like Second Life and various Web 2.0 technologies as instruments for creating better collaborative communities.As my many publications show, I have a solid grounding in the design theories underlying community informatics, and built up a large personal worldwide network of researchers and practitioners in the field. Over the years, I have been involved in many R&D projects. With my company, I can now fully focus on combininng innovative research insights with problems and requirements following from practice.