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Virtual Community
Practices and Social
Interactive Media:
Technology Lifecycle and
Workflow Analysis

Demosthenes Akoumianakis
Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece

Information science reference

Hershey • New York
Director of Editorial Content: Kristin Klinger
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Published in the United States of America by

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not indicate a claim of ownership by IGI Global of the trademark or registered trademark.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Virtual community practices and social interactive media : technology lifecycle and workflow analysis / Demosthenes Akoumianakis, editor.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Summary: "This book makes a step toward an improved understanding of existing literature, prevalent practice and future trends related to
community thinking, virtual practices and their intertwining with new technologies and social media"--Provided by publisher.

ISBN 978-1-60566-340-1 (hardcover) -- ISBN 978-1-60566-341-8 (ebook) 1. Online social networks--Case studies. 2. Internet--Social
aspects--Case studies. I. Akoumianakis, Demosthenes, 1966-

HM742.V57 2009
302.30285--dc22
2008047747

British Cataloguing in Publication Data

A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

All work contributed to this book is new, previously-unpublished material. The views expressed in this book are those of the authors, but not
necessarily of the publisher.
Editorial Advisory Board
Demosthenes Akoumianakis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece
Chris Kimble, Euromed Marseille École de Management, France
Wesley Shumar, Drexel University, USA
Manolis Tsiknakis, Institute of Computer Science, FORTH, Greece

List of Reviewers
Demosthenes Akoumianakis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece
Dimitrina Dimitrova, York University, Canada
Kam Hou VAT, University of Macau, Macau SAR, China
Natalie Pang, Monash University, Australia
Richard Ribeiro, University of York, UK
Nikolas Vidakis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece
Theodor G. Wyeld, Flinders University, Australia
Table of Contents

Preface................................................................................................................................................xviii

Acknowledgment................................................................................................................................ xxii

Section A
Introduction
Chapter I
New Media, Communities, and Social Practice: An Introductory Tutorial............................................. 1
Demosthenes Akoumianakis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece

Section B
Communities of Practice

Chapter II
Conditions and Key Success Factors for the Management of Communities of Practice....................... 18
Edurne Loyarte, VICOMTech Visual Communication Interaction Technologies Centre San
Sebastian, Spain
Olga Rivera, University of Deusto, San Sebastian, Spain

Chapter III
The Search for ‘Hidden’ Virtual Communities of Practice: Some Preliminary Premises..................... 42
Richard Ribeiro, University of York, UK
Chris Kimble, Euromed Marseille École de Management, France

Chapter IV
The Generative Potential of Appreciative Inquiry for CoP: The Virtual Enterprise’s Emergent
Knowledge Model.................................................................................................................................. 60
Kam Hou VAT, University of Macau, Macau

Chapter V
The Role of Participatory Design in Constructing the Virtual Knowledge Commons.......................... 86
Natalie Pang, Monash University, Australia
Chapter VI
The ‘Social Experience Factory’ and the Fabrics of Collaboration in Virtual Communities of
Practice................................................................................................................................................. 101
Demosthenes Akoumianakis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece

Section C
Social Media and Tools

Chapter VII
Social TV: Building Virtual Communities to Enhance the Digital Interactive Television Viewing
Experience .......................................................................................................................................... 126
Evangelia Mantzari, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece
George Lekakos, University of the Aegean, Greece
Adam Vrechopoulos, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece

Chapter VIII
Evaluating the Effectiveness of Social Visualization within Virtual Communities . .......................... 145
Diana Schimke, University of Regensburg, Germany
Heidrun Stoeger, University of Regensburg, Germany
Albert Ziegler, Ulm University, Germany

Chapter IX
GRIDS in Community Settings........................................................................................................... 164
Ioannis Barbounakis, Technological Educational Institute of Crete, Greece
Michalis Zervakis, Technical University of Crete, Greece

Chapter X
Socializing in an Online Gaming Community: Social Interaction in World of Warcraft.................... 190
Vivian Hsueh Hua Chen, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Henry Been Lirn Duh, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Chapter XI
Social Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services.............................................................................. 207
Stelios Sfakianakis, ICS-FORTH,Greece

Section D
Practice Toolkits and Design Perspectives

Chapter XII
Virtual Community Practice Toolkits Using 3D Imaging Technologies............................................. 227
George Triantafyllidis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece
Nikolaos Grammalidis, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, Greece
Dimitiros Tzovaras, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, Greece
Chapter XIII
Using Activity Theory to Assess the Effectiveness of an Online Learning Community:
A Case Study in Remote Collaboration Using a 3D Virtual Environment.......................................... 249
Theodor G. Wyeld, Flinders University, Norway
Ekaterina Prasolova-Førland, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway

Chapter XIV
Interaction, Imagination and Community Building at the Math Forum.............................................. 269
Wesley Shumar, Drexel University, USA

Chapter XV
Designing Practice-Oriented Interactive Vocabularies for Workflow-Based Virtual CoP................... 283
Demosthenes Akoumianakis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece
Giannis Milolidakis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece
George Vellis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece
Dimitrios Kotsalis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece

Chapter XVI
Developing User Interfaces for Community-Oriented Workflow Information Systems..................... 308
Josefina Guerrero García, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain School of Management
(LSM), Belgium
Jean Vanderdonckt, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain School of Management
(LSM), Belgium
Juan Manuel González Calleros, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain School of
Management (LSM), Belgium

Section E
Practice Domains and Case Studies

Chapter XVII
Virtual Communities in Health and Social Care.................................................................................. 332
Manolis Tsiknakis, Institute of Computer Science, FORTH, Greece

Chapter XVIII
Research Communities in Context: Trust, Independence, and Technology in Professional
Communities........................................................................................................................................ 352
Dimitrina Dimitrova, York University, Canada
Emmanuel Koku, Drexel University, USA

Chapter XIX
Enabling Virtual Music Performance Communities............................................................................ 378
Chrisoula Alexandraki, Technological Educational Institute of Crete, Rethymnon
Branch, Greece
Nikolas Valsamakis, Technological Educational Institute of Crete, Rethymnon Branch, Greece
Chapter XX
Sustainable E-Learning Communities................................................................................................. 400
Chris Stary, University of Linz, Austria

Chapter XXI
Cross-Organization Virtual CoPs in E-Tourism: Assembling Information-Based Products............... 414
Nikolas Vidakis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece
Dimitrios Kotsalis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece
Giannis Milolidakis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece
George Vellis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece
Anargyros Plemenos, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece
Emmanouela Robogiannaki, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece
Kyriakos Paterakis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece
Demosthenes Akoumianakis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece

Chapter XXII
Social Interactive Media and Virtual Community Practices: Retrospective and an
R&D Agenda........................................................................................................................................ 443
Demosthenes Akoumianakis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece

Compilation of References................................................................................................................ 453

About the Contributors..................................................................................................................... 489

Index.................................................................................................................................................... 498
Detailed Table of Contents

Preface................................................................................................................................................xviii

Acknowledgment................................................................................................................................ xxii

Section A
Introduction

Chapter I
New media, Communities, and Social Practice: An Introductory Tutorial.............................................. 1
Demosthenes Akoumianakis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece

This chapter aims to provide an introductory tutorial to the key topics and themes suggested in the chapter’s
title and further developed by authors in the four main parts of this volume. It was considered important
to provide this introductory account for two main reasons. First, it serves the purpose of sketching the
boundaries of the volume by establishing an early focus on the concepts being addressed and highlighting
the volume’s orientation. This is expected to help the reader clarify the difference between this edited col-
lection of chapters and other relevant literature. Secondly, the tutorial will hopefully unfold the rationale
behind the structure of the volume into parts as well as the contributions selected in each part.

Section B
Communities of Practice

Chapter II
Conditions and Key Success Factors for the Management of Communities of Practice....................... 18
Edurne Loyarte, VICOMTech Visual Communication Interaction Technologies Centre San
Sebastian, Spain
Olga Rivera, University of Deusto, San Sebastian, Spain

Communities of practice (CoPs) have been taken into account by both practitioners and academics
during the last ten years. From a strategic point of view, CoPs have shown their importance for the
management of organizational knowledge by offering repositories of knowledge, improved capacity of
making knowledge actionable and operational (Brown & Duguid, 1998) and by facilitating maintenance,
reproduction, and extension of knowledge (Brown & Durguid, 2001). CoPs are also reported to achieve
value creation and competitive advantages (Davenport & Prusak, 1998), learning at work (Swan et alt.,
2002) that promotes organizational competitiveness (Furlong & Johnson, 2003), innovation, even a radi-
cal type (Swan et alt., 2002), responsiveness, improved staff skills and reduced duplication (du Plessis,
2008). This impressive list of achievements is not for free; some authors have pointed out the limits of
CoP’s (Duguid, 2005; Roberts, 2006; Amin & Roberts, 2008) from diverse points of view, including
diversity of working environments, size, spatial or relational proximity, but mainly emphasizing the
specificity of CoPs as a social practice paradigm, as it was defined by Wenger (1999, 2000) credited as
the “inventor” of the term “CoP” (Lave & Wenger, 1991). This chapter focuses on the consideration
of CoPs as an organizational reality than can be managed (Thompson, 2005), the contradictions that
the idea of managing them generates, and how these controversial points can be overcome in a sound
and honest way. To do so, the authors review different cases of CoP’s within organizations intended for
the managerial team to achieve important organizational goals. Their analysis provides: (a) a reflection
regarding the Key Success Factors in the process of integrating communities of practice, (b) insight to
the structure of a model of cultivation, intended as a guideline for new experiences in this area, and (c)
an informative account of this model’s adaptation to the studied organizations.

Chapter III
The Search for ‘Hidden’ Virtual Communities of Practice: Some Preliminary Premises..................... 42
Richard Ribeiro, University of York, UK
Chris Kimble, Euromed Marseille École de Management, France

This chapter examines the possibility of discovering a “hidden” (potential) Community of Practice (CoP)
inside electronic networks, and then using this knowledge to nurture it into a fully functioning Virtual
Community of Practice (VCoP). Starting from the standpoint of the need to manage knowledge and
create innovation, the chapter discusses several issues related to this subject. It begins by examining
Nonaka’s SECI model and his notion of Knowledge Transfer; the authors follow this by an investiga-
tion of the links between Communities of Practice (CoPs) and Knowledge Management; the chapter
concludes by examining the relation between Nonaka’s Communities of Interaction and CoPs. Having
established this they start their examination of the characteristics of “hidden” Communities of Practice.
Following on from the previous discussion, they look at what is meant by “hidden” CoPs and what their
value might be. The authors also look at the distinction between Distributed CoPs (DCoPs) and Virtual
CoPs (VCoPs) and the issues raised when moving from “hidden” CoPs to fully functioning VCoPs.
The chapter concludes with some preliminary findings from a semi-structured interview conducted in
the Higher Education Academy Psychology Network (UK). These findings are contrasted against the
theory and some further proposals are made.

Chapter IV
The Generative Potential of Appreciative Inquiry for CoP: The Virtual Enterprise’s Emergent
Knowledge Model.................................................................................................................................. 60
Kam Hou VAT, University of Macau, Macau

The chapter investigates an actionable framework of knowledge sharing, from the perspective of ap-
preciative inquiry. This framework should accommodate the creation of appreciative processes that
would encourage or better institutionalize knowledge sharing among people of interest in an organiza-
tion. The idea is extensible to the building of communities in cyberspace so much facilitated in today’s
Internet and World Wide Web, and it is increasingly visible that such a model of knowledge sharing is
quite promising for today’s virtual enterprises. The premise in our exploration is that organizations were
beginning to understand the power of unleashing knowledge among individuals. What they struggled
with was how exactly to unleash that power, albeit that the very behavior of hoarding knowledge is
what makes employees successful. The presence of an explicitly appreciative format rendered by the
enterprise should allow many to say what is on their mind without being questioned, critiqued or put on
the defense. And it could be done using the many electronic services of technology-enabled appreciative
systems made available. However, the task of identifying what to watch in building a knowledge-sharing
community online is not at all straightforward. For example, community can be examined by focusing
on how users or participants work with and learn from the experience of community participation, or on
the nature of collective imagination and feelings of identity as a tool for understanding belonging and
attachment to particular virtual communities. Our investigation should provide a basis to think about
the generative potential of some appreciative processes on a virtual community’s knowledge activities.
The design and refinement of technology as the conduit for extending and enhancing an organization’s
appreciative systems is an essential issue, but the role of the individuals as participants in a virtual com-
munity is as important. The emergent challenge is to de-marginalize the concept of appreciative shar-
ing of knowledge among members of the organization, expositing on the effective meaning behind the
organization’s creation of the appreciative framework for knowledge work through which purposeful
individual or organizational activities could be supported with the elaboration of suitable information
technologies.

Chapter V
The Role of Participatory Design in Constructing the Virtual Knowledge Commons.......................... 86
Natalie Pang, Monash University, Australia

The main goal of this chapter is to demonstrate how purposeful participatory design can be used to
construct a virtual knowledge commons that both serves and is defined by communities. Other than
the proposition that participatory design is a technique to guide participation within a community, the
chapter also explores how this technique can be used to nurture and sustain a shared knowledge com-
mons in the virtual environment. To this end, the conditions and consequences of the virtual environ-
ment are discussed, illustrating how with participation, the virtual commons is possibly sustainable. The
chapter also raises the role of cultural institutions and examines a number of contemporary examples,
resulting in a preliminary spectrum of participation by which practices of participation in the virtual
knowledge commons by cultural institutions can be mapped. More research and fieldwork needs to be
done to refine this model and generate exemplary practices for policy development and best practices
in cultural institutions.

Chapter VI
The ‘Social Experience Factory’ and the Fabrics of Collaboration in Virtual Communities of
Practice................................................................................................................................................. 101
Demosthenes Akoumianakis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece
This chapter proposes and discusses the “social” experience factory (SEF). The SEF provides a general
model and architecture supporting information-based product assembly by cross-organization commu-
nities of practice using interactive toolkits and practice-specific technologies. In terms of engineering
ground, the SEF builds on two prevalent research tracks, namely experience-based and reuse-oriented
proposals for the management of virtual assets and automated software assembly as conceived and fa-
cilitated by recent advances on software factories. In our account of the SEF, the authors will focus on
functions facilitating electronic squads (i.e., cross-organization virtual community management) and
workflows (i.e., practice management) which collectively define the scope of collaboration using the
SEF. Further technical details on operational aspects of the SEF as deployed in the tourism sector to
facilitate vacation package assembly are presented in Chapter XXI in this volume.

Section C
Social Media and Tools

Chapter VII
Social TV: Building Virtual Communities to Enhance the Digital Interactive Television Viewing
Experience .......................................................................................................................................... 126
Evangelia Mantzari, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece
George Lekakos, University of the Aegean, Greece
Adam Vrechopoulos, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece

Until recently, television viewing was perceived as a passive experience that aimed in satisfying a person’s
or a group’s need for entertainment, information and, in some cases, education. However, the development
of Interactive Digital Television (iDTV) and the significant change of society’s expectations due to the
appearance of the World Wide Web brought new dynamics on the medium. To that end, nowadays, iDTV
adopts a more social role (Social TV) in order to satisfy the individuals’ request for active participation,
communication and (virtual) community formulation. This chapter aims at describing the characteristics
of Social TV, while providing information about its systems and business models. Similarly, the present
study attempts to explain if and how Social TV can become a new setting for virtual communities and
what are the potential implications for its viewers.

Chapter VIII
Evaluating the Effectiveness of Social Visualization within Virtual Communities............................. 145
Diana Schimke, University of Regensburg, Germany
Heidrun Stoeger, University of Regensburg, Germany
Albert Ziegler, Ulm University, Germany

Participation and system usage is crucial for virtual communities to develop and sustain. However,
many communities report very low participation rates of members. Finding and studying strategies for
fostering participation in virtual communities is therefore a growing field of research and different ap-
proaches for strengthening participation in virtual communities exist – among them social visualization.
While many tools for visualizing social interactions have been developed, not much empirical evidence
about their actual effectiveness exists. To find out more about the effectiveness of social visualization
on the participation rate (number of logins, forum posts, personal messages, and chat posts) the authors
conducted an empirical study within CyberMentor – a virtual community for high school girls interested
in science and technology. In our sample of N=231 girls the authors did not find a significant difference
between the number of logins in the phases before and after the introduction of the visualization tool.
The number of forum post, chat posts and personal messages however increased significantly after the
incorporation of the visualization tool. Long-term effects were found for one-to-many communication
technologies (forum, chat), but not for personal messages (one-to-one).

Chapter IX
GRIDS in Community Settings........................................................................................................... 164
Ioannis Barbounakis, Technological Educational Institute of Crete, Greece
Michalis Zervakis, Technical University of Crete, Greece

The authors have been running the second decade since the time that pioneers in Grid started to work on
a technology which seemed similar to its predecessors but in reality it was envisioned totally divergent
from them. Many years later, the grid technology has gone through various development stages yielding
common solution mechanisms for similar categories of problems across interdisciplinary fields. Several
new concepts like the Virtual Organization and Semantic Grid have been perfected bringing closer the
day when the scientific communities will collaborate as if all their members were at the same location,
working with the same laboratory equipment and running the same algorithms. Many production-scale
standard-based middlewares have been developed to an excellent degree and have already started to
produce significant scalability gains, which in the past, were considered unthinkable.

Chapter X
Socializing in an Online Gaming Community: Social Interaction in World of Warcraft.................... 190
Vivian Hsueh Hua Chen, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Henry Been Lirn Duh, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) allows a large number of players to cooperate, compete
and interact meaningfully in the online environment. Gamers are able to form social network with fel-
low gamers and create a unique virtual community. Although research has discussed the importance of
social interaction in MMOG, it fails to articulate how social interaction takes place in the game. The
current chapter aims to depict how gamers interact and socialize with each other in a popular MMOG,
World of Warcraft. Through virtual ethnography, specific interaction patterns and communication be-
haviors within the community are discussed. It is concluded that the types of social interaction taken
place in the gaming world is influenced by the temporal and spatial factors of the game as well as the
game mechanisms.

Chapter XI
Social Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services.............................................................................. 207
Stelios Sfakianakis, ICS-FORTH,Greece

In this chapter the authors aim to portray the social aspects of the World Wide Web and the current and
emerging trends in “Social Web”. The Social Web (or Web 2.0) is the term that is used frequently to
characterize Web sites that feature user provided content as their primary data source and leverage the
creation of online communities based on shared interests or other socially driven criteria. The need for
adding more meaning and semantics to these social Web sites has been identified and to this end the Se-
mantic Web initiative is described and its methodologies, standards, and architecture are examined in the
context of the “Semantic Social Web”. Finally the embellishment of Web Services with semantic annota-
tions and semantic discovery functionality is described and the relevant technologies are explored.

Section D
Practice Toolkits and Design Perspectives

Chapter XII
Virtual Community Practice Toolkits Using 3D Imaging Technologies............................................. 227
George Triantafyllidis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece
Nikolaos Grammalidis, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, Greece
Dimitiros Tzovaras, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, Greece

Extending visual communications to the third dimension (3D) has been a dream over decades. The
ultimate goal of the viewing experience is to create the illusion of a real environment in its absence.
However limitations of visual quality and user acceptance prevented the development of relevant mass
markets so far. Recent achievements in research and development triggered an increasing interest in 3D
visual technologies. From technological point of view, this includes improvements over the whole 3D
technology chain, including image acquisition, 3D representation, compression, transmission, signal
processing, interactive rendering and 3D display. In the center of all these different areas, the visualiza-
tion of 3D information stands as the major aspiration to be satisfied, since 3D enriches the interaction
experience. This enhanced user experience that 3D imaging offers compared to 2D, is the main reason
behind the rapid increase of the virtual communities using and managing 3D data: Archaeological site
3D reproductions, virtual museums (in the field of cultural heritage); 3D plays, special effects (in the
field of entertainment); virtual classes (in the field of learning) are only some examples of the potenti-
alities of 3D data. It’s clear that 3D imaging technologies provide a new and powerful mechanism for
collaborative practicing. In this context, this chapter focuses on the utilization of 3D imaging technology
and computer graphics, in various virtual communities in the domains of education, cultural heritage,
protection, health and entertainment.

Chapter XIII
Using Activity Theory to Assess the Effectiveness of an Online Learning Community:
A Case Study in Remote Collaboration Using a 3D Virtual Environment.......................................... 249
Theodor G. Wyeld, Flinders University, Norway
Ekaterina Prasolova-Førland, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway

Remote, collaborative work practices are increasingly common in a globalised society. Simulating these
environments in a pedagogical setting allows students to engage in cross-cultural exchanges encountered
in the profession. However, identifying the pedagogical benefits of students collaborating remotely on a
single project presents numerous challenges. Activity Theory (AT) provides a means for monitoring and
making sense of their activities as individuals and as a collective. AT assists in researching the personal and
social construction of students’ intersubjective cognitive representations of their own learning activities.
Moreover, AT makes the socially constructed cultural scripts captured in their cross-cultural exchanges
analysable. Students’ reflection on these scripts and their roles in them helps them better understand
the heterogeneity of the cultures encountered. In this chapter Engestrom’s (1999) simple AT triangular
relationship of activity, action and operation is used to analyze and provide insights into how students
cooperate with each other across different cultures in a 3D collaborative virtual environment.

Chapter XIV
Interaction, Imagination and Community Building at the Math Forum.............................................. 269
Wesley Shumar, Drexel University, USA

This chapter draws upon contemporary social theory to make an argument about the ways that teach-
ers create personalized communities of practice at The Math Forum, an online educational resource
center. The discussion of social networks and personalized community is brought into dialogue with
sociologically oriented strands of math education research to suggest that the collaborative community
building work that Math Forum teachers do online allows them to not only form a learning community
but allows them to overcoming tensions around mathematical identity formation which are important for
advancing one’s thinking as a math teacher. The chapter discusses some of the interview data conducted
with math forum teachers and the importance of that information for the future of teacher professional
development and the way an online community can support teacher learning.

Chapter XV
Designing Practice-Oriented Interactive Vocabularies for Workflow-Based Virtual CoP................... 283
Demosthenes Akoumianakis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece
Giannis Milolidakis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece
George Vellis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece
Dimitrios Kotsalis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece

This chapter concentrates on the development of practice-specific toolkits for managing on-line practices
in the context of virtual communities of practice. The authors describe two case studies in different applica-
tion domains each presenting alternative but complementary insights to the design of computer-mediated
practice vocabularies. The first case study describes how established practices in music performance are
encapsulated in a suitably augmented music toolkit so as to facilitate the learning objectives of virtual
teams engaged in music master classes. The second case study is slightly different in orientation as it seeks
to establish a toolkit for engaging in new coordinative practices in the course of building information-
based products such as vacation packages for tourists. This time the virtual team is a cross-organization
virtual community of practice with members streamlining their efforts by internalizing and performing
in accordance with the new practice. Collectively, the case studies provide insight to building novel
practice-specific toolkits to either encapsulate existing or support novel practices.
Chapter XVI
Developing User Interfaces for Community-Oriented Workflow Information Systems..................... 308
Josefina Guerrero García, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain School of Management
(LSM), Belgium
Jean Vanderdonckt, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain School of Management
(LSM), Belgium
Juan Manuel González Calleros, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain School of
Management (LSM), Belgium

Technology to support groups is rapidly growing in use. In recent years, the Web has become a privileged
platform for implementing community-oriented workflows, giving rise to a new generation of workflow
information systems. Specifically, the Web provides ubiquitous access to information, supports explicit
distribution of business process across workers, workplaces, and computing platforms. These processes
could be all supported by platform-independent user interfaces. This chapter presents a model-driven
engineering method that provides designers with methodological guidance on how to systematically
derive user interfaces of workflow information systems from a series of models. For this purpose, the
workflow is recursively decomposed into processes which are in turn decomposed into tasks. Each task
gives rise to a task model whose structure, ordering, and connection with the domain model allows
the automated generation of corresponding user interfaces in a transformational approach. The various
models involved in the method can be edited in a workflow editor based on Petri nets and simulated
interactively.

Section E
Practice Domains and Case Studies

Chapter XVII
Virtual Communities in Health and Social Care.................................................................................. 332
Manolis Tsiknakis, Institute of Computer Science, FORTH, Greece

This chapter provides an overview and discussion of virtual communities in health and social care. The
available literature indicates that a virtual community in health or social care can be defined as a group
of people using telecommunications with the purposes of delivering health care and education, and/or
providing support. Such communities cover a wide range of clinical specialties, technologies and stake-
holders. Examples include peer-to-peer networks, virtual health care delivery and E-Science research
teams. Virtual communities may empower patients and enhance coordination of care services; however,
there is not sufficient systematic evidence of the effectiveness of virtual communities on clinical out-
comes. When practitioners utilize virtual community tools to communicate with patients or colleagues
they have to maximize sociability and usability of this mode of communication, while addressing con-
cerns for privacy and the fear of de-humanizing practice, and the lack of clarity or relevance of current
legislative frameworks. Furthermore, the authors discuss in this context ethical, legal considerations
and the current status of research in this domain. Ethical challenges including the concepts of identity
and deception, privacy and confidentiality and technical issues, such as sociability and usability are
introduced and discussed.
Chapter XVIII
Research Communities in Context: Trust, Independence, and Technology in Professional
Communities........................................................................................................................................ 352
Dimitrina Dimitrova, York University, Canada
Emmanuel Koku, Drexel University, USA

This chapter examines a community of professionals, created by a government agency and charged with
conducting country-wide, cross-disciplinary, and cross-sectoral research and innovation in the area of
water. The analysis describes the structure of the community and places it in the context of existing proj-
ect practices and institutional arrangements. Under challenging conditions, the professionals in the area
recruit team members from their trusted long-term collaborators, work independently on projects, use
standard communication technologies and prefer informal face-to-face contacts. Out of these practices
emerge a sparsely connected community with permeable boundaries interspersed with foci of intense
collaboration and exchange of ideas. In this community, professionals collaborate and exchange of ideas
with the same colleagues. Both collaboration and exchanges of ideas tend to involve professionals from
different disciplines and, to a lesser extent, from a different sectors and locations.

Chapter XIX
Enabling Virtual Music Performance Communities............................................................................ 378
Chrisoula Alexandraki, Technological Educational Institute of Crete, Rethymnon
Branch, Greece
Nikolas Valsamakis, Technological Educational Institute of Crete, Rethymnon Branch, Greece

The chapter provides an overview of virtual music communities focusing on novel collaboration environ-
ments aiming to support networked and geographically dispersed music performance. A key objective
of the work reported is to investigate online collaborative practices during virtual music performances
in community settings. To this effect, the first part of the chapter is devoted to reviewing different kind
of communities and their corresponding practices as manifested through social interaction. The second
part of the chapter presents a case study, which elaborates on the realization of virtual music communities
using a generic technological platform, namely DIAMOUSES. DIAMOUSES was designed to provide
a host for several types of virtual music communities, intended for music rehearsals, live performances
and music learning. Our recent experiments provide useful insights to the distinctive features of these
alternative community settings as well as the practices prevailing in each case. The chapter is concluded by
discussing open research issues and challenges relevant to virtual music performance communities.

Chapter XX
Sustainable E-Learning Communities................................................................................................. 400
Chris Stary, University of Linz, Austria

Knowledge acquisition in E-Learning environments requires both, individualization of content, and social
interaction based on relevant learning items. So far few e-learning systems support an integrated didactic
and social perspective on knowledge transfer. Intelligibility Catchers (ICs) are E-Learning components
designed for establishing sustainable communities of E-Learning practice. They encapsulate didactic and
communication-centered concepts for effective collaborative and reflective generation and exchange of
knowledge. Due to their open nature, they can be created dynamically, for any domain and on different
levels of granularity. By intertwining content and communication, context can be kept for learning and
exploration, even bound to specific community members.

Chapter XXI
Cross-Organization Virtual CoPs in E-Tourism: Assembling Information-Based Products............... 414
Nikolas Vidakis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece
Dimitrios Kotsalis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece
Giannis Milolidakis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece
George Vellis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece
Anargyros Plemenos, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece
Emmanouela Robogiannaki, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece
Kyriakos Paterakis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece
Demosthenes Akoumianakis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece

This chapter describes recent work and experience in setting up and supporting cross-organization virtual
communities of practice to facilitate new product development. The authors’ reference domain is tourism
and the community’s joint enterprise is assembly of vacation packages. The chapter contrasts existing
practices involved in building vacation packages against the computer-mediated practices flourishing
in an electronic village of local interest on regional tourism. The electronic village is considered as an
aggregation of thematic virtual communities (i.e., neighborhoods) each with own rules, policies and
primitive offerings covering tourism services such as accommodation, transportation, cultural resources,
and so forth. Electronic squads are formed as cross-neighborhood communities of practice to engage in
computer-mediated assembly of vacation packages. The chapter presents key tasks involved in manag-
ing both electronic squads and the workflows through which the shared resources are combined and
transformed into new collective offerings.

Chapter XXII
Social Interactive Media and Virtual Community Practices: Retrospective and an
R&D Agenda........................................................................................................................................ 443
Demosthenes Akoumianakis, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece

This chapter attempts to consolidate concepts, ideas and results reported in this volume in an effort to
synthesize an agenda and sketch a roadmap for future research and development on virtual community
practices facilitated by synergistic combination of social interactive media. In this endeavor, the author
revisits the notions of new media, communities and social practice, in the light of the preceding chapters
and with the intention to pickup seemingly heterogeneous concepts and sketch the puzzle of social interac-
tive media and virtual community practice. Their ultimate target is to make inroads towards a reference
model for understanding and framing online social practice under the different regimes constituted by
new media and social computing.

Compilation of References................................................................................................................ 453

About the Contributors..................................................................................................................... 489

Index.................................................................................................................................................... 498
xviii

Preface

This volume is the result of nearly two years of intensive work to define relevant terms and scope,
invite contributions, initiate and facilitate revisions, and finally edit a collection of chapters which will
hopefully make a step towards an improved understanding of existing literature, prevalent practice and
future trends related to community thinking, virtual practices and their intertwining with new technolo-
gies and social media.
This collection of chapters appears at a moment that virtual communities have already started to
dominate our daily residential and business activities, acting as amplifiers of human intellect and making
tremendous inroads in expanding our social substance and professional competence, both as individuals
and members of society. The popular press provides subtle evidence. More than 15 out of the top 20 most
popular Web sites are either social network sites per se, or have embedded social networking functions.
Furthermore, numerous studies indicate the increasing engagement of users, especially young people
in blogging activities, making Weblog hosting sites such as Myspace and Xanga among the most active
sites on the Web with millions of daily visits.
Examining critically this new situation, one may pose several questions, recurring with every novel
idea, new virtuality and technological trajectory:

• What is the innovative ground upon which it is based?

• Is it the result of advances in scientific endeavor, technical progress or incremental response to the
end-users’ ever increasing demand for information processing?
• Why does it happen when it does and what implications it bares upon human activities?
• How far-reaching are its effects and do they constitute a paradigm shift?

These are only a few of the questions one may ask when observing the new reality at home, in the
office, the university and the variety of physical and virtual social gathering places. At the core of these
new experiences are novel practices which increasingly determine how we think about ourselves as
individuals and as members of wider social groupings. Some of these practices, such as for example
social networking have matured to the point that they are already part of our culture. Others put into
question our very existence as social creatures. For instance, multiple identity management in our virtual
endeavors challenges our traditional means of presenting our selves to colleagues and peers.
Against these developments, the current volume aims to investigate critically some of the forces
shaping present and future virtual community life, driving developments in new media and enabling
either reproductions of existing practices or the emergence of totally new virtualities. The term virtuality
refers to any kind of technological construction or mediation, which allows humans to attain business,
residential, social or communication-oriented activities in a virtual space.
 xix

Key Themes and Orientation

In recent years, virtual communities of various sorts and types such as “place”-based online communities,
virtual social networks, intra- and inter-organization distributed communities of practice, to mention a
few, have stimulated a truly interdisciplinary thematic domain of discourse attracting the attention of
scientists and researchers across a variety of disciplines, including the social sciences (e.g., sociology,
cognitive psychology, anthropology, management science) and several engineering disciplines such as
software engineering, telecommunications and multimedia. As in many other cases, the cross-disciplinary
nature of the innovation creates the potential for a new virtuality, which as it turns out, it brings about a
wider impact and has far-reaching effects than initially intended or anticipated.
Communities are not just aggregates of people, temporarily interacting; they are dynamic entities
whose added value results from their continuous evolution. Their inherent complexity becomes evident
from the variety of definitions attempted and the different connotations assigned to this social phenom-
enon. Community has been defined as a group of people who share social interactions, social ties, and
a common “space”; as a social network of relationships that provide sociability support, information,
and a sense of belonging, and as a set of relationships where people interact socially for mutual benefit.
The key seems to be strong and lasting interactions that bind community members and that take place
in some form of common space.
Accordingly, their virtual counterparts, in whatever way they are coined, are complex social systems
enabled by a complex set of information technologies. Despite their infant stage, they have already shown
the potential to provide the new virtuality, which in an increasingly networked society, can augment
“collective” human intellect and set new standards for individuals and organizations. Stated differently,
this new virtuality can re-shape the conduct of social activities, deepen professional knowledge and
practice and create new grounds for knowledge management.
In the early 1990’s when the first theoretical works on virtual communities appeared many scholars
seemed to converge on the idea that the only difference between traditional and virtual communities
is that the later exists in cyberspace. However, recent empirical studies indicate that this is no longer
a valid assumption or sufficient distinction. In fact, virtuality brings new vocabulary and expands the
community’s language in many different ways. Consequently, the challenge is not only reproducing
established practices online, but more importantly, it is gaining the required insight and understand-
ing to design for new practices, specific to the new media, and viable only in virtual settings. This last
point is intended to provide a preamble of this volume’s orientation and point of departure from other
relevant contributions found in the literature. Specifically, chapters within the volume aim to explore the
intertwining between virtual communities, new media and the social practices emerging or reproduced
as a result of new technology.

Objective and Perspectives

In light of the above, the objective of the volume is not simply to compile and disseminate state of the
art knowledge on a truly multidisciplinary area, but also to highlight issues, which will further catalyze
developments in the years to come. To this end, the scope of the volume is broad and covers the theoreti-
cal foundations of virtual communities, technological and engineering perspectives on the construction
of community-based virtualities as well as the type, nature and scope of reconstructed or novel practices
emerging in specific applications domains.
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