ICIW 2013, best paper award - A Novel Risk-based Approach for Online Community Management

Online communities play a pivotal role in innovation, marketing, corporate expertise management, product support and advertising. Communities in the order of millions of users are becoming the norm. However, this proliferation of demand is not met with intelligent, scalable, easy to use community management approaches. Current methods are based on basic statistical tools that aggregate data for the community owner/moderator to interpret and take appropriate actions. The data reflects only the current state of the community, which does not constitute an effective warning system of future events. Moreover, the community health becomes highly dependent on the owner’s skill, interpretation, intimate knowledge of the community and its evolution path. This paper presents a proactive, extensible, risk-based management framework supporting advanced analytical services for managing online communities. The solution allows community owners to focus on the community objectives and proactively manage favourable/unfavourable events at the user and community level.