Formation of a Community: in the Case of a Particular Non-profit Sports Organization

摘要

Non-profit sports organizations play a more important role in our society than ever before, as the public is now more aware of their personal health and have recognized the importance of a community for persistent sport exercise. The long-term interactions of members in such organizations allow researchers to observe the structure of the organizations from the perspective of a dynamic social network. With this paper, we study the formation of a non-profit sports organization, with data collected over more than four years. Our main goal is to understand the dynamics in the formation and to find how the formation is affected by external stimulus. We build a network based on members' interactions in organizational activities. And mining the dynamic characteristics of the community for the purpose of looking for the relationship between the dynamics and external incentives. Community evolution-based method is used in analyzing the dynamic network. The results of the study indicate that specific incentive behaviors have a definite impact on the communities' evolution, and provide useful insights in building similar non-profit sports organizations, especially when the available resource for doing that is limited.