Group items tagged

By Colin Harrison in Education and the Knowledge Society: Information Technology Supporting Human Development by Tom J. van Weert, October 2004 (Springer, via Google Books).  Harrison's article is pp 244-246. He looks at how an online barter system (like his proposed Cybertroc) might facilitate ride-shares. One interesting idea is how this barter might help to build social capital in the area in which it is implemented and provides an interesting service to some who might otherwise be uninterested in "Information Society." Frustratingly, no details on the implementation of such an idea, other than to refer readers to a ride-share enacted during a 2003 French transportation strike. 

By Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, First Monday, Vol 3(3), 2 March 1998. Nearly 14 years later, many of the impressions of and language about the Internet in this article seem quaint and outddated. However, the author offers the "cooking pot" model to explain how much content and code is shared for "free" on the Internet. In the Internet cook pot model, since physical proximity and distribution are not truly issues, the "pot" can grow (and be widely shared) by as much as people chose to put in it.

This article does not look at internet barter per se, but helps to explain how all the ideas around barter and trade look different on the internet than they might look in the physical world.

Wiki of the P2P (peer to peer) foundation that studies "the impact of Peer to Peer technology and thought on society." Topics include collaboration, "open" business models, "change institutions," etc.  Librarian's note: found this site while trying to learn more about cybertroc (online barter)

By M. Ginsburg and S. Weisband, Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2004. Written in 2004, this article is somewhat dated (e.g. before the notion of the "social network" really took hold). That said, the article looks at a subscription-based virtual community, the Internet Chess Club, and finds that the real key to success is a carefully structured 3-tier approach to volunteering. Some volunteers help/coach new users; others are available to handle administrative tasks and volunteer managers run on-demand tournaments. Volunteers gain status and recognition, as well as the benefit of a private sub-community in which they can communicate with each other. NOTE: As of Jan 2012, the club is still in existence.

Librarian notes: While much here does not apply to the current manifestation of our e-communities, the structure and function of the various volunteer roles is very interesting, as is the "communication segmentation strategies" to filter out information overload. An impressive database of the community's work (in this case chess matches) is discussed as well.