On-line communities: What motivates people to take part?

In this paper we address the issue of motivation to take part in on-line communities alongside factors that enhance and sustain community participation over time. In order to illustrate these issues we outline three case studies of on-line communities and compare the lessons learnt regarding motivation to previous research findings in the literature. The paper concludes with a set of guidelines that are currently being used to design a new software engineering community, the intention of these is to establish, foster and further sustain user participation in on-line communities