Designing a Portal and Community with the Community Generator

A virtual community is, in the sense of Rheingold (1993), a group of people communicating or interacting with each other by means of information technologies, typically the Internet, rather than face to face. The idea and phenomenon of virtual communities, the genetic DNA of how computer networks are populated by people—in private-closed, public-open or semi-public spaces—offer a rich background for business practice. Hagel and Armstrong (1997) outlined the commercial application of communities behind Web portals with a growing number of community-contents, loyalty and customer relationships, member-profiles and transactions in “Net Gain: Expanding Markets through Virtual Communities.” Additionally, Participate.com ex-post measured the benefits of virtual communities with instructive results (Cothrel, 2000). On this basis Fraunhofer-Institute, in Germany, developed a common definition for “Internet business communities” (Bullinger, 2002, p. 25). Internet business communities are economic networks for professional relationship management of employees, customers and business partners. The essential principle is a membership; on that condition services for specific users and user groups can be customized. After the registration, non-members get a user account, which conduces to protect the community-access, read permission, write/change permission, or billing. During the login members are asked for their username and their personal password; subsequently the data is compared to the data of the existing user account. The purpose of the login is to identify the member and also permits to create closer user profiles; current member profiles are the basis of every Internet community. Schubert (2000) specifies nine different types of profiles: profiles for identification (username, role, contact information), system profiles (User-ID, rights and operations), session profiles (access paths, click streams), socio-economic profiles (age, gender, hobbies), preference profiles (user preferences), profiles for interaction (logfiled data), subcommunity profiles (matching of preferences), profiles based on a specific case (provision of preconfigured opportunities) and transaction profiles.