UNDERSTANDING KNOWLEDGE SHARING IN ONLINE COMMUNITIES: THE IMPACTS OF TECHNICAL AND SOCIAL DIMENSIONS

Web 2.0, also referred to as the ‘social web’, has become the new wave of the Internet in recent years. Web 2.0 is defined as a series of modern online tools and technologies through which user participation is the crucial key to information sharing and ultimately collective intelligence. Knowledge sharing, the process of conveying knowledge to individuals and groups is a key topic within the knowledge management domain, which tends to focus on organizational contexts. To date, information systems literature lacks a thorough investigation of factors that affect knowledge sharing in Web 2.0 online communities. This study seeks to develop a theoretical model to explain the social and technical antecedents of knowledge sharing in popular Web 2.0 social networks (e.g. Facebook) and aggregators (e.g. Digg) and the moderating role of anonymity. The model presented in this work-in-progress paper will be validated through surveys involving Web 2.0 users and collected data will be analyzed using PLS