The forming of virtual communities process as a nonlinear dynamic system

The article continues a series of works devoted to the description and analysis of distributed technology of concrete historical investigation support based on the principles of crowdsourcing. This article is devoted to the description and substantiation of the approach to modeling the stage of formation of the research community and evaluation of the prospects of project deployment depending on the volume of the initial content of the semantic network underlying the technology. The proposed approach is to analyze the processes of changing the number of participants in the research community and the volume of the semantic network of technology as a nonlinear dynamic system. The analysis was performed for different initial conditions. With the help of this approach, the estimation of the level of the initial filling of the semantic network was obtained at which the steady growth of the community is provided. The adequacy of the model was checked by comparing the character of community growth determined by the simulation with the empirical graph of changes in the number of participants in network communities.