Most members' contributions to an online community pertain to what Preece calls its purpose. Members post to discussion groups, rate movies and receive recommendations, and read each others' blogs. These contributions are visibly important and constitute the day to day business of the community. However, communities need inputs besides conversation, such as moderation, governance, and the maintenance of databases (members, movies, FAQs, and histories, for instance). These duties usually fall to the owners of the community. Owners don't have to be the only people who can perform maintenance. Web sites could be designed to allow all members to contribute information. By taking advantage of all members' knowledge and effort, member-maintained communities can reduce their dependence on key members while increasing their overall value to everyone and reflecting everyone's desires. But letting members contribute is not a panacea. Most systems have no interface for contributing. Members need to be motivated to do the job and trained to do it well---and perhaps watched also, because some will make mistakes and others may sabotage the group. We believe that social science theories that address why people contribute to groups can be a valuable tool for designing interfaces and increasing people's motivation to contribute.

Title	Authors	Appears In	Publication Date	Date added
How Oversight Improves Member-Maintained Communities	Cosley, D., Frankowski, D., Kiesler, S., Terveen, L., Riedl, J.	Proceedings of CHI 2005	2005	07.13.06
SuggestBot: Using Intelligent Task Routing to Help People Find Work in Wikipedia	Cosley, D., Frankowski, D., Terveen, L., and Riedl, J	Intelligent User Interfaces	2007	06.06.07
Using Intelligent Task Routing and Contribution Review to Help Communities Build Artifacts of Lasting Value	Cosley, D., Frankowski, D., Terveen, L., & Riedl, J.,	Proceedings of CHI 2006	2006	07.13.06
Virtual Community Maintenance with a Collaborative Repository	Hansen, Derek, Ackerman, Mark, Resnick, Paul, and Munson, Sean	to appear in Proceedings of ASIST 07		07.03.07