Online communities (OLCs) are gatherings of like -minded
people, brought together in cyberspace by shared interests.
Creating such communities is not a big challenge;
sustaining members' participation is. In this paper, we
describe a technique for presenting members' photos and
evaluate how it affects member participation in the
community. We compare three different policies for
presenting peer photos on the home page of the web site.
Our results show that explicit requests in the form of simple
and short messages on the home page of a community can
induce participation. We show that we were able to
motivate members to (a) log into the system to see photos
of fellow members, and (b) upload their personal photos.