I am a faculty member at the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh. I've been studying and working with online communities since the mid-1990s (mostly as an advisor/consultant in an educational context). In particular, I am interested in how design choices (like infrastructure capabilities, content focus, and membership practices) interact with the selection processes arising from the highly voluntary nature of online community participation to affect the viability and character of online communities.

Earlier this spring I taught a course entitled "The Business of Blogs, Online Communities, and Social Networking".

Recently, I've been looking at possible models for community competition (both between communities and between subgroups within a community) that might help answer questions about how to design and faciliate systems of communities.