Designing during use: Modeling communities of practice

We examine digital social media ecosystems such as blogs and mailing lists from the perspective of communities of practice. We observe behaviors of agents and specify prevalent patterns of collaborations in digital media ecosystem.We describe several techniques important in patterns specification such as social network analysis and content analysis. The conceptualization of our observations was done by the goal-oriented modeling framework i*. Models of digital social media ecosystems include agents causing changes over a time and detect disturbances coming from outside. As a proof statement we use the models of our case study that define three different communities of practice based on discovered patterns. In the end we present what is expected to be done in the future in the area of digital media ecosystems modelling.