Creating and Supporting Virtual Communities - A City that Happens on a Facebook Group.

During the last years, the number of Online Social Networks (OSNs) users has been growing in a fast pace. In this context, it is common for people to be part of virtual communities, which may range from neighbourhood communities to communities of an artist's fans. However, creating and managing successful municipal virtual communities remains a challenge. In this paper, we describe a five years experiment encompassing the creation and management of a virtual community of a Brazilian town with 21,400 inhabitants using the Facebook Groups Tool. Currently, the group has 14,132 members, which corresponds to 66% of the population. Since the beginning, we follow Scott Peck's theory of community building. As a result, we describe a number of strategies involving the creation and management of municipal virtual communities. Besides, we list some difficulties we faced because of the lack of support from Facebook Groups tool for this type of communities.