A virtual community is one of communities that exist in an internet economy; however, little research has been conducted on how to make it sustainable. We propose a methodology for creating sustainable virtual communities which depends on the community’s respond to the dynamic factors in its environment such as number of members, shared contents and interaction rules. The methodology proposes the use of iterative negotiation and a panel of expert agents to assess the quality of service (QoS) delivered. This QoS assessment is based on an interaction agreement between the community members and expert agent as the administrator’s representative. The administrators use this QoS assessment to determine whether an individual’s membership will be renewed or terminated after a certain period of time. We present a metric to measure the sustainability index and demonstrate the validity of the methodology by engineering a prototype setup and running simulations under various operational conditions.

 

Keywords: virtual communities; dynamic factors; sustainability index.