Not Only for Ideation, But Also for Signaling: Incorporating User-Profile-Webpages into Virtual Ideas Communities

This research-in-progress-paper describes the case of SAPiens, which is a Virtual Ideas Community (VIC). Typically, SAPiens - and VICs in general - focuses solely on supporting the ideation interactions among members. There is evidence from a survey that SAPiens members are also interested in actively signaling competences, experiences and skills to third parties. However, SAPiens does not offer IT functionalities that would allow for such a signaling. Against this backdrop, we propose to enrich SAPiens through User Profile Webpages allowing SAPiens members to construct a public profile within the community and thereby to signal individual capabilities, skills and experiences. The aim of this action design research is to design such an IT artifact by building on the signaling theory. After this initial design, our research constitutes a circular process of constant refinement as well as piloting and evaluation of the IT artifact in the real world setting of the SAPiens VIC.