Final Thesis: Marketing a Community-Based Open Data Portal

Abstract: Creating a flourishing volunteer-driven community portal is a hard task, even if the underlying social cause is good and motivating. Community founders need to reach out and market the portal, they need to seed the portal and attract volunteers, and they need to keep and grow the volunteer base. This master thesis reviews prior work and best practices for attracting volunteers to web communities, suggests new ones, and performs a longitudinal case study of these best practices by applying them to the Mydosis community portal for pediatric dosage information in the German-speaking D-A-CH area. The main result of the thesis work is a review of existing best practices for marketing and building web-based communities and their application to a particular case, the Mydosis web portal.

Keywords: Open Source Software Development, Open Data Portal, Community Management, Web-based Community, Mydosis

PDFs: Master Thesis, original work description

Reference: Christoph Wille. Marketing a Community-Based Open Data Portal. Master Thesis, Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg: 2011.