Emerging Trust Patterns in Online Communities

This paper presents an attempt to provide un understand of the possible trust influence in the successful development of online communities. This was achieved by implementing a research framework who aims to understand what is trust and it role in the online learning communities development and how does that interrelations is related with learners´ activity and participation patterns. This research main rational was focused on the today´s social changes, especially those who are related with people´s education patterns. It believes that people´s trust beliefs are somehow related with the online community development, and somehow is a key element for participation. Major contributions of this work are twofold (1) it briefly outline a research strategy and main motivation for exploring the above proposed relationship, (2) presents and discusses the early results of a survey carried out among e-learning communities. Results that explores the interrelation between people´s trust beliefs and their sharing activities and participation attitudes in an online context.