Boosting participation in virtual communities

We have been experiencing an explosion in the market of social websites that aim not only to entertain us, but also to help us enlarge our professional networks, to redefine business models and capture new customers, to modify the way learning and teaching are performed, among others. So far, little research has been done on what drives individuals to contribute to online communities, as there is not enough empirical evidence to validate well-established models. In this research we propose to design, develop and test a set of principles and functionalities a virtual community should have in order to attempt to achieve a high degree of activity by its members. We will focus, at first, on the particular case of educational virtual communities. We would like our results to cover more of the scenarios and area regardless of its content and context.