I look forward to submission to Participation and Behaviors in Virtual Communities and Virtual Worlds mini-track in AMCIS2013! First CALL FOR PAPERS Mini-Track "Participation and Behaviors in Virtual Communities and Virtual Worlds" 19th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) August 15-17, 2013, Chicago, Illinois, USA AMCIS 2013 website http://amcis2013.aisnet.org/ Mini-Track website http://www.virtual-community.org ============================================================================ Virtual communities are collective groups of individuals who utilize computer-mediated environments to interact and pursue mutual goals. Originally starting up from grass root, virtual communities have been evolved into essential business applications in today’s blossoming internet application diffusion process during the last two decades. Starting from the original marketing and branding purpose, the virtual communities have been influencing the overall business process with organizations. The implementation of virtual communities inside a company’s intranet and extranet is wide spread in major companies. A virtual world is a computer-generated three-dimensional space where users interact with one another and with objects in the environment through their avatars. Compared to the burgeoning diffusion of virtual community applications, the virtual world technology is still in the emerging stage and its application hasn’t been very popular despite many big companies are still keeping their virtual presence in SecondLife or their individual virtual world. In both virtual communities and virtual worlds, members’ participation and behavior play crucial role in sustaining the virtual communities or virtual worlds to run. The participation and behavior in these two areas share similarities yet differences do exist due to the design and situation differences of these two virtual places. There have accumulated various theories explaining partition and behaviors in both virtual communities and virtual worlds in the last two decades. The theories such as sense of belongs, TAM, social capital have all been used to explain virtual community participation. The theory to explain virtual world behavior is relatively less compared to those of virtual communities. However, there hasn’t been an established line of theory to explain participation and behaviors of these two virtual places. The aim of this mini track aims at calling for new theories, frameworks, and integrated work to explain participation and behaviors for these two areas. This minitrack welcomes both conceptual and empirical research on virtual community and virtual world participation behavior either at the individual, group, and organizational level. Possible topics · Specific behavior patterns and characteristics of virtual community and virtual world users · Motivation for people to participate in virtual communities virtual worlds · Impact of virtual community and virtual world participation and behavior on virtual community and virtual world users’ life and work · Multi-level approach to studying the users’ behavior and participation in virtual communities and virtual worlds · Virtual community and virtual world users’ behavior impact on the business applications · Cultural factors and their impact on user’s behavior · Commentaries from specific virtual worlds · Case studies and ethernography study of virtual community and virtual world users’ behavior · Group and organizational behavior in virtual community and virtual worlds · Collaboration behavior in virtual community and virtual worlds · Financial behavior in virtual communities and virtual worlds · Difference and similarity between virtual community and virtual world behavior · Enterprise usage of virtual communities and virtual worlds -- 李红蕾 -- Dr. Honglei Li -------------------------------------------------------- Senior Lecturer in Enterprise Information Systems School of Computing, Engineering, and Information Sciences Northumbria University Newcastle Upon Tyne NE1 8ST Phone: +44 091 243 7830 (O) +44 0787 2653330 (M) E-mail:HongleiLi@gmail.com; Honglei.Li@northumbria.ac.uk Homepage: http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/about/staff/honglei_li