Community support platforms are gaining more and more interest in areas ranging from leisure support and customer support in electronic commerce to knowledge management in enterprises. However, current solutions usually are built as proprietary systems or as add-ons to systems designed for other purposes. The platforms are usually not very customisable and interoperable and are not utilizing the full potential of the community support idea. We have introduced community platforms in several projects and have derived some requirements for their development in these projects. In this paper we present these requirements and motivate an architecture for generic community support platforms designed to fulfil these requirements.    «

Community support platforms are gaining more and more interest in areas ranging from leisure support and customer support in electronic commerce to knowledge management in enterprises. However, current solutions usually are built as proprietary systems or as add-ons to systems designed for other purposes. The platforms are usually not very customisable and interoperable and are not utilizing the full potential of the community support idea. We have introduced community platforms in several proje...    »