geert lovink wrote:
Dear Air-l,
for my PhD at the University of Melbourne I have recently written a few case studies of mailinglist communities. Now I am winding up this project and for the introduction and conclusion I would like to refer to a few similar case studies, but I can't find all that many of them. Does anyone have a suggestion? It could be studies about virtual communities but that's perhaps a bit too broad. I am in particularly interested in internal dynamics and issues of sustainability. Any reference is most welcome.
BTW. I do like the (new) afterword Howard Rheingold wrote for his Virtual Community book which MIT Press reprinted recently. I am not sure how welknown this text is. It's a good and honest reassessment of his passions.
My PhD was in this area but by large scale analysis of discourse dynamics and I was born in Sydney Australia. A couple of months ago I submitted a paper to Information Systems Research that compares usenet and listserv sustainablity patterns. The abstract is given below The Boundaries of Virtual Communities: