Help-seeking communities have been playing an increasingly critical role the way people seek and share information online, forming the basis for knowledge dissemination and accumulation. We would like to find mechanisms to augment their functionality and social life. Research is proceeding to make use of the available structure in online communities to design new systems and algorithms. These are largely focused on social network characteristics of these communities. However, differing network structures and dynamics will affect possible algorithms that attempt
to make use of these networks, but little is known of these impacts.

Accordingly, we developed a CommunityNetSimulator (CNS), a simulator that combines various network models, as well as various new social network analysis techniques that are useful to study online community (or virtual organization) network formation and dynamics.