Managing Sustained Online Engagement to Solve Community Problems: An Exploration of Virtual Town Hall Meeting Systems
Social web technologies have opened unprecedented opportunities for public- and private-sector entities to leverage the collective power of remotely-connected online participants to solve shared problems. However, both practitioners and researchers report that the most challenging issue in open participatory problem-solving initiatives is keeping online participants continuously engaged in a specific project, with sustained interest throughout the entire project cycle. Mindful of the opportunities and challenges of participatory online problem-solving, this study aims to accomplish two researc