IEA Technical Committee on 'Online Communities'

Undoubtedly, the one technology that has had the greatest influence on social and business practices in the last 15 years is the Web. The Web has fundamentally changed our access to information and communication resources as well as our way to collectively produce knowledge (e.g. wikipedia, open-source software). For people with access to the Web, information is accessible from virtually anywhere in the world. The Web has also seen the burgeoning of alternative communication media from simple text-based communication systems, through more interactive text-based communication systems (e.g. blogging, mailing lists, etc.), to highly interactive multimedia communication applications (e.g. videoconferencing, Skype, FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.). While research on online communities has largely been found in the computer-human interaction and computer-supported cooperative work fields, there is definitely a role to play for ergonomics in understanding these new processes of socialisation and knowledge production/sharing and improving the design of these systems supporting these processes. These issues will be of particular interest to this Technical Committee on ‘Online Communities’.

Essentially there are two main themes that are of particular interest to ergonomics and online communities. First, ergonomics has a role to play in evaluating the efficacy of such communities and ultimately to apply ergonomic principles to design better systems. Second, ergonomics is concerned with understanding mechanisms of better work design. Online communities may have a role to play here in improving the flow of important work variables and in socialisation practices. With these general points in mind, it is worthwhile to consider more specific problem domains of interest to this Technical Committee.