Building virtual professional communities

Professionals exploit professional knowledge, which they create in communities. These communities are often distributed and typically meet during regular events to further their community development, exchange their expertise. Virtual professional communities could use the Internet as their cooperation platform, which intuitively looks like the technological ideal match for the networked organizational structure of professional communities. However, the take-up of Internet technology is still slow. In this paper we develop a model to explain how virtual professional communities can be created, organized and managed in such a way that the perceived value of membership becomes a driver for community development. We will illustrate our model with the case of the "Virtual Organization Forum" from which we derive seven critical factors for successful building a virtual professional community.