Designing virtual communities for work

While the popularity of networked virtual communities has been growing, their us has been mainly to engage in online socializing. Given the necessity of communication and collaboration among distributed workers, it seems natural to consider how these spaces might be used to support work and the surrounding social interactions. This collection of papers summarizes a workshop that was held at CSCW '98 that focused on understanding how organizations are currently using virtual communities, and how they could be enhanced to better support the needs of collaborative workers. By "virtual communities" we think primarily of MUDs, and other collaboration software involving some text, graphics, and/or other media. The workshop explored how to take advantage of the inherently engaging attributes of virtual communities to accomplish work, preserve organizational memory, promote corporate culture, and encourage professional networking. We identified issues that were common to the various groups exploring work-based virtual communities and shared the design approaches currently being tried out.