Self-Organizing Pervasive Online Communities

Social software systems have widely been employed in the process of online community forming in order to support collaborative user participation. Nevertheless, the discovery of people with the same interests or a similar context has still to be accomplished manually by the users themselves. Moreover, the inherent dynamic nature of community forming with regards to changing user interests and participation in a pervasive setting increases the needs to automatically adapt communities to the current situation of the user. We introduce a framework for the development of user-centric community platforms supporting the flexible and adaptive management of user communities. For this purpose, we make use of the collaborative synergies of social software and apply advanced features such as recommendation and personalization to realize self-organization of online communities