| Twenty five hobby Internet Web sites and blogs devoted to quilting are the subject of this qualitative study. The research asks what roles creativity, virtual community, and expressed motivations play in prompting hobby enthusiasts to create online information repositories for public use, without expectation of reward, and if there are transferable principles that can be used to motivate employees in work settings to contribute to electronic information repositories. The findings, which discuss issues of teaching, community, generativity, creativity, and emotion, are placed with serious leisure, everyday life information seeking (ELIS), and interface design contexts. The results of this study indicate that interfaces offering flexible roles, accommodation of off-topic discussion, and opportunities for creativity, if placed within a positive work-community environment, will help stimulate employee contributions to information repositories. |
