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Riding the innovative wave of device interconnectivity in Web 2.0 (Hendler, 2009) and the further network-as-platform semantic web advancements of Web 3.0 (O’Reilly, 2009), modern Internet capabilities are heralding an interconnected Web of devices and capabilities, enabling fast information access spanning broad geographical areas and time zones. As part of this emerging information access revolution, one can acquire knowledge beyond traditional communication channels (such as schools, work, and social venues) through the use of virtual communities (Bagozzi & Dholakia, 2003; Teo et al., 2003). Chiu and colleagues (2006) observe that virtual communities provide numerous social interactions that can facilitate knowledge sharing, particularly for individuals who share common goals, interests, or practices. Virtual communities also facilitate organizational knowledge sharing and learning (Kankanhalli et al., 2005; Wasko & Faraj, 2000). For example, Enterprise 2.0, strategic integration of Web 2.0 into company networks and business processes, provides collaboration and knowledge sharing in this manner (McAfee, 2006; 2009).
Online community activities can be oriented toward marketing, commerce, and education (Teo et al., 2003), but regardless of the thematic focus or patterns of practice in virtual communities, their viability and proliferation depend on sustained individual participation and knowledge sharing (Nov et al., 2009). It is strictly a matter of community member buy-in; without sufficient knowledge exchange arising from such buy-in motivations, communities are likely to decline (Chiu et al., 2006). For that reason, it becomes important to understand community members' motivations for sharing knowledge in their chosen virtual communities.
Transactional Virtual Communities are one prominent sort of grouping (Sun et al., 2012). In transactional communities, an exchange process takes place wherein one member compensates another with information in exchange for answers to a posted question. Other sorts of virtual communities operate for the public good, not seeking exchanges or financial incentives; these are “non-transactional” communities. One subset of non-transactional communities, Virtual Communities of Practice (Ardichvili et al., 2003), has received plentiful attention in the prior literature (see Table 7 in the Appendix). Communities of practice are groups of participants who share a concern for a specific set of problems and seek solutions to the problems through information exchange (Line et al., 2006).
There is yet another non-transactional community type that has received little attention in the literature - Virtual Community of Interest. Communities of interest are found in online social media such as Curiosity, Facebook Groups, Reddit, Yahoo! Answers, Twitter Hashtags. Virtual Communities of Interest are built on knowledge sharing related to specific topics of interest prized by significant numbers of their membership (De Valck et al., 2007), and are driven more by learning that problem solving, as in the case of communities of practice. Even so, the information search and acquisition processes are so similar across the two community types that they could be considered functionally equivalent at an anecdotal level for knowledge management purposes. Yet, the presumption that the two types of communities are largely commensurable deserves examination, hence the primary research purpose of this study is to examine the motivational factors of knowledge sharing in Virtual Communities of Interest, in order to see what differences may be there.