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co-producers in activities that traditionally are performed by companies only. In short, they portray the customer as architectures [15, 28], communities as business models [29, 30], communities as collaboration platforms [14], Proceedings of the 35th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences- 2002both value consumer and producer. While this enhanced customer role (both consumer and producer) presents companies with new opportunities, it also puts forward new organizational challenges. Needless to say, there is potential role ambiguity involved in crossing the traditional producer-customer boundary. On the one hand, customers act in the role of producers by devoting time and energy to value-adding activities such as product development and marketing without monetary compensation; on the other hand, the customers act in the role of consumers of the identity-construction and trust [6, 17, 31], and the open source management [16, 26]. While this body of knowledge is important in understanding the characteristics and perceptions of the emerging field of virtual communities, it portrays a rather fragmented picture from which it is difficult to extract a common understanding of community management. Throughout this paper, we refer to “community management ” as the activity of establishing, maintaining, and re-producing a virtual community for commercial purposes. One distinctive feature o