Managing Information Quality in Virtual Communities of Practice.

Abstract

This paper examines why the rise of computermediated communication, driven by dramatically lowered cost, creates new structural problems from an information quality standpoint. We review how the new economics of information enable a new paradigm of collaboration. Spearheaded by the Open Source community, this evolutionary approach to collaborative content creation is a way to address information quality in virtual communities of practice. Based on experience gained in community projects, a few simple steps toward improving the quality of information in virtual communities are presented and illustrated.