Enterprise Social Networks (ESNs), d. h. Informationssysteme, die die Vernetzung von Mitarbeitern in Unternehmen f{\"o}rdern sollen, sind in verschiedenen Varianten und unter verschiedenen Bezeichnungen (etwa Enterprise Social Media, Corporate Social Software, Social Business oder Enterprise 2.0) bereits seit etwa gut einem Jahrzehnt auf dem Markt. Dennoch erfreuen sie sich erst seit den letzten Jahren steigender Beliebtheit und halten ebenfalls nach und nach fl{\"a}chendeckenden Einzug in Gro{\ss}unternehmen wie Siemens, Daimler oder Deutsche Telekom. Um mit dem Gartner »Hype Cycle« zu argumentieren: Das Thema ESN hat die Spitze des Hypes l{\"a}ngst {\"u}berschritten, das »Tal der Entt{\"a}uschungen« durchschritten und n{\"a}hert sich nun zunehmend dem »Plateau der Produktivit{\"a}t«. Motivation genug, um sich anhand einiger ausgew{\"a}hlter Fallbeispiele mit ESNs genauer auseinanderzusetzen.

Along with the increasing popularity of social media and online communities in many business settings, the notion of online community health has become a common means by which community managers judge the condition or state of their communities. It has also been introduced to the literature, yet the concept remains underspecified and fragmented. In this paper, we work toward a construct conceptualization of online community health. Through a review of extant literature and dialogue with specialists in the field, we develop a multi-dimensional construct of online community health, consisting of seven elements. In writing this paper, we attempt to foster theory development around new organizational forms by advancing a new and important construct. The paper further provides guidance to the managers of social media and online communities by taking a systematic look at the well-being of their communities.

Previous research suggests the existence of sentiments in online social networks. In comparison to real life human interaction, in which sentiments have been shown to have an influence on human behaviour, it is not yet completely understood which mechanisms explain how sentiments influence users in online environments. We develop a theoretical framework that tries to bridge the gap between social influence theories that focus on offline interactions on one hand and online interaction in social networks on the other hand. We then test our hypothesis about the influence and dissemination of sentiments in a quantitative analysis that is based on retrieved textual messages of communication patterns in over 12000 online social networks. Our empirical results suggest a general influence of sentiments on node communication patterns that is evidenced by increased occurrences of subsequent messages that express the same sentiment polarization. We interpret these findings and suggest future research to advance our currently limited theories that assume perceived and generalized social influence to path-dependent social influence models that consider actual behaviour.

The interoperability of web archives and digital libraries is crucial to avoid silos of preserved data and content. While various researches focus on specfic facets of the challenge to interoperate, there is a lack of empirical work about the overall situation of actual challenges. We conduct a Delphi study to survey and reveal the insights of experts in the field. Results of our study are presented in this paper to enhance further research and development efforts for interoperability.

The new technological enhancements and the accessibility to varieties of online applications, enable users to collect personal data and perform self-evaluation through test, comparison and experimentation. The sparked interest in numbers and numbers as self-representative visualisations is prominent in social networking sites, which are the empirical setting for the present study. This paper sets out to establish a multi-theoretical framework which enables the investigation of emerging phenomena of the role of numbers in social networking sites. The proposed framework rests on three theoretical pillars: self-determination theory, heuristic decision making and behavioural economics. A discussion departs from these convictions to investigate user reactions and behaviour when faced with numerical representations in the SNS.

The usage of social software to support collaboration and knowledge management in corporate intranets is a pervasive topic in practice and research. However, there remain many open research questions concerning its socio-technical system design. To address this gap and to contribute to a deeper understanding of the role and success of corporate social software, we first identify and conceptualize simplicity as an influential design principle and usage factor. We propose a theoretical framework that helps us to empirically study the role of simplicity based on six case vignettes of corporate social software implementation and use. From the theoretical basis and the empirical analysis we develop a series of theoretical propositions and discuss implications for IS design and adoption.

challenge for the digital preservation community. While the methodological frameworks for selecting these properties provide a good foundation, a continued discussion is necessary for further clarifying and improving the available methods. This paper advances earlier work by building on the existing InSPECT framework and improving its capabilities of working with complex/compound objects like blogs. The modifications enable a more thorough analysis of object structures, accentuate the differences and similarities between the framework’s two streams of analysis (i.e. Object and Stakeholder analysis) and, subsequently, improve the final reformulation of the properties. To demonstrate the applicability of the modified framework, thepaper presents a use case of a blog preservation initiative that is informed by stakeholder interviews and evaluation of structural and technological foundations of blogs. It concludes by discussing the limitations of the approach and suggesting directions for future research.

Communication within online social network applications enables users to express and share sentiments electronically. Existing studies examined the existence or distribution of sentiments in online communication at a general level or in small-observed groups. Our paper extends this research by analyzing sentiment exchange within social networks from an ego-network perspective. We draw from research on social influence and social attachment to develop theories of node polarization, balance effects and sentiment mirroring within communication dyads. Our empirical analysis covers a multitude of social networks in which the sentiment valence of all messages was determined. Subsequently we studied ego-networks of focal actors (ego) and their immediate contacts. Results support our theories and indicate that actors develop polarized sentiments towards individual peers but keep sentiment in balance on the ego-network level. Further, pairs of nodes tend to establish similar attitudes towards each other leading to stable and polarized positive or negative relationships

Blogging has often been described as writing an online diary but, nowadays, it is more diverse and a considerable amount of blogs forms a common interconnected resource – the blogosphere – with comprehensive societal impact. While various studies have inquired social-psychological influenceson the intention to contribute to an individual blog, the perceptions related to creating such a common valuable good have not yet been focussed. Therefore, we introduce a new construct – the oeuvre of blogging – to better account for the notion of the blogosphere as a collective outcome. Furthermore, we propose a research model to inquire the influence of individual and collective beliefs on the oeuvre in comparison to short-term blogging activity. We conducted an online survey with 509 international distributed bloggers to test our model. The results of our study provide support for the importance of an oeuvre construct to explain influences on bloggers and blogging

Communication in online social networks has been analyzed for some time regarding the expression of sentiments. So far, very little is known about the relationship between sentiments and network emergence, dissemination patternsand possible differences between positive and negative sentiments. The dissemination patterns analyzed in this study consist of network motifs based on triples of actors and the ties among them. These motifs are associated with common social network effects to derive meaningful insights about dissemination activities. The data basis includes several thousand social networks with textual messages classified according to embedded positive and negative sentiments. Based on this data, sub-networks are extracted and analyzed with a dynamic network motif analysis to determine dissemination patterns and associated network effects. Results indicate that the emergence of digital social networks exhibits a strong tendency towards reciprocity, followed by the dominance ofhierarchy as an intermediate step leading to social clustering with hubs and transitivity effects for both positive and negative sentiments to the same extend. Sentiments embedded in exchanged textual messages do only play a secondary role in network emergence and do not express differences regarding the emergence of network patterns.

IRIS (Information Systems Research in Scandinavia) Conference is an annual meeting for researchers in Scandinavia. Through 29 annual conference meetings a social network of co-authorships and general research collaboration has emerged. This article contributes a historical reflection and analysis of the social network of researchers associated with the IRIS in the period from 1978 to 2006. We make use of the network visualization and analysis tool called Commetrix. We will examine the influence of certain researchers in this network by identifying their betweenness centrality and degree centrality. We will reflect on the nature and characteristic of the research topics by analyzing the network of keywords found in the conference paper titles, and visualizing their representation in the network.

In knowledge intense business processes, a complex and dynamic body of knowledge is being built bottom-up by experience learning during exception handling and problem solving. Traditional qualification programs do not very effectively provide the special skills required. Communities of Practice are better supporting this dynamic on-the-job learning across hierarchies. Still, CoP approaches and platforms in many organisations can be improved by enriching them with e-learning components to create a connection between the unstructured personalisation strategy of CoPs and the structured training materials. Similarly, e-learning benefits from being linked to communities. In the article, the connections of both areas are analysed to derive a framework for integration. It proposes an agenda of activities for the two domains people-oriented and content-oriented integration of community management and e- learning. These two aspects affect the handling, configuration and design of software features. In a first stage, the challenge is mainly a management and organisational task. Consecutively, the integration processes can be further assessed in order to identify potentials for IT-automatisation.