Hidden or implicit contextual factors influencing user participation in online production communities

User participation is an inextricable part of online communities that live off user-generated content. Since these communities depend on sustained participation, they often employ various incentives to maximize the contributions and collective intelligence of users. Most prior research on user participation is focused on one specific type of production community (e.g. open source or Wikipedia) or on explicit incentives. However, despite the large body of literature devoted to this area, few systematic attempts have yet been made to identify common hidden or implicit factors. These factors sometimes have considerable impact on user commitment and participation. In this paper, we review and organize the pertinent literature and provide a generic list of implicit factors that account for a sustained flow of contributions. We also hypothesize a model that represents the interdependencies of some of these factors. The outcome provides community designers with a fine-grained knowledge framework and the corresponding design guidelines.