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1. Introduction
The advent of Web 2.0 is driving an emergent interest in the so-called virtual communities of practice. The current web is a much different entity than the web of a decade ago. Until recently, the web has been far from interactive and users rarely had a chance to participate ([28] Kolbitsch and Maurer, 2006). But now the social-networking trend is causing a major shift from publisher-generated content, where one or a few publishers decide on what information is published on a website, to user-generated content, where the majority of the visitors decide on the information that is published on a website. The model has basically changed from top-down to bottom-up creation of information and interaction, and this has been made possible thanks to a new generation of web applications that give power to users ([53] Weaver and Morrison, 2008). Internet is causing the emergence and the consolidation of new social structures and forms of organisations in which the traditional temporary space references are not valid. These social structures, which take place in a cybernetic virtual space, help people to communicate themselves supporting a level of interaction that extends in time, and they are usually known as virtual communities. These kind of social structures are not new. They are well known since two decades ago, when the term "community of practice" was first introduced by [31] Lave et al. (1991). The idea of a community of practice implies a group of people in contact with one another involved in a circumscribed set of activities and a shared practice ([19] Fox, 2000). They develop their own routines, formal and informal "rules", and practices evolve as a result of learning ([54] Wenger, 1998). The importance of these communities has been acknowledged in a number of previous works ([11] Brown and Duguid, 1998; [7] Boland and Tenkasi, 1995; [39] Pan and Leidner, 2003), showing their relation with knowledge management ([55] Wenger et al. , 2002; [35] Martínez-Torres, 2006). When their participants keep in contact by means of electronic tools, they are considered virtual communities.
Virtual communities are recognised as a new business model of the digital economy ([33] Lin, 2007; [18] Figallo, 1998; [49] Toral et al. , 2009a), characterised by two architectural features:
The members of...