On Influence in Online Creative Craft Communities and the Relevance of Virtuosity and Community Engagement
Authors: Ozer, Gorkem Turgut; Gopal, Anand; Jarvenpaa, Sirkka L.
Journal: Journal of the Association for Information Systems (2026)
DOI: 10.17705/1jais.00982
<jats:p>Creative craft communities have existed for years, allowing craftsmen to meet, interact, and share knowledge as they create products with aesthetic and utilitarian value. In recent years, these communities have moved online. In this paper, we study one such online creative craft community, Ravelry, a community devoted to fiber arts such as knitting and crocheting. Combining prior research on creative craft, online communities, and reputation building, we examine how influence is established by the designers in a creative craft community. Specifically, we argue that designers as artist-craftsmen are likely to achieve influence by presenting highly sought-after craft designs for reuse by others in the community. Using panel data on designers collected from Ravelry, we show that artistic influence, as measured by the extent of design reuse, is positively associated with the extent to which the designer demonstrates virtuosity, in terms of design difficulty and creative variety across product categories. Furthermore, we show that community engagement positively moderates the relationship between virtuosity and design reuse. Theoretically, this study contributes to our understa…