GlobalHUB: A model for sustainable online communities

Recently, sustainability of virtual organizations has been receiving increasing attention in the literature. Most of suggested sustainability pieces have been theoretical in nature or based on case studies. The essence of such articles is: build it, and they will come. However, as the authors have discovered in their experience with a virtual organization called GlobalHUB, putting all of the suggested building blocks into place does not necessarily lead, by itself, to sustainability of a virtual organization. The authors argue that sustainability has many complex and dynamic dimensions that need to be addressed in existing models of sustainability for virtual organizations. In this paper the auhtors provide our key learnings in the process of building GlobalHUB as a sustainable online community.