A.S. Vivacqua, C. Gutwin, and M.R.S. Borges (Eds.): CRIWG 2011, LNCS 6969, pp. 14–29, 2011. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011 Boosting Participation in Virtual Communities Francisco Gutierrez 1 , Nelson Baloian 1 , and Gustavo Zurita 2 1 Computer Science Department (DCC), Universidad de Chile, Blanco Encalada 2120, Santiago, Chile {frgutier,nbaloian}@dcc.uchile.cl 2 Management Information Systems Department, Universidad de Chile, Diagonal Paraguay 257, Santiago, Chile gzurita@fen.uchile.cl Abstract. We have been experiencing an explosion in the market of social web- sites that aim not only to entertain us, but also to help us enlarge our profes- sional networks, to redefine business models and capture new customers, to modify the way learning and teaching are performed, among others. So far, lit- tle 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 at- tempt 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. Keywords: Motivation, Participation, Virtual Communities, Social Networks, Collaborative Work, Collaborative Learning. 1 Introduction Over the last few years, we have witnessed an explosion in the development of social networks on the Web, dramatically changing the way applications and services of- fered by various providers are used. This is the case of participative websites like YouTube, with more than 10 billion videos played each month, Wikipedia, with more than 10 million articles in 250 different languages and of different social networks such as Facebook, with more than 500 million users, MySpace, LinkedIn, among many others that expect to reach 1 billion users by 2012 [1]. In the particular case of social networks, and mainly virtual communities, social websites are well accepted and widely used in everyday life by a large number of web users. These communities exist because people with similar goals, beliefs or values lay the basis of an agreement to form and sustain a virtual existence [2]. This way, internet users belonging to a particular community can track interesting information being promoted, discussed or tagged on the Internet [3]. However, these ties may not be strong enough to sustain the existence of the com- munity over time, resulting in members gradually leaving the virtual community,