Projects
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. After a successful academic career, I can now fully focus on applying innovative social media research insights to collaboration problems in practice. See this sample of my R&D and consultancy projects to get a feel for my activities.
Research Focus
Since 1995, my main research interest has been the evolution of virtual communities. I am interested in collaborative communities in which people work together to achieve common goals: what are the drivers of the way they work and grow? What are useful ways to describe these communities and their lifecycles? How to design effective socio-technical systems that balance the complex and ever changing social norms and workflow requirements of these very human communities with the technical potential of the numerous tools available through the Internet?
Activating Collaborative Communities
Recently, my work has been expanding into how to align various social media tools like wikis, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter with the existing information and communication systems of organizations. One R&D issue of particular interest is how to activate online collaborative communities: how to make community members understand and take their responsibilities for making collaboration a success? How to use online tools effectively to prevent information and communication overload?