Mobile virtual communities research - CiteSeerX

386

Int. J. Web Based Communities, Vol. 3, No. 4, 2007

Mobile virtual communities research: a synthesis of current trends and a look at future perspectives Christo El Morr* School of Health Policy and Management York University 4700 Keele Street, HNES Bldg. #433, Toronto ON M3J 1P3, Canada E-mail: [email protected] *Corresponding author

Jalal Kawash Department of Computer Science American University of Sharjah P.O. Box 26666, Sharjah, UAE E-mail: [email protected] Abstract: This article is a synthesis of current research trends in mobile virtual communities. It classifies Mobile Virtual Communities (MVCs) research into appropriate domains, and categorises the different types of virtual communities with respect to three criteria: the degree of virtualisation, the degree of mobility and the degree of cooperation. It also draws some conclusions on future research directions. Keywords: Mobile Virtual Communities; MVCs; Computer Supported Cooperative Work; CSCW; virtual communities; mobility; survey. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: El Morr, C. and Kawash, J. (2007) ‘Mobile virtual communities research: a synthesis of current trends and a look at future perspectives’, Int. J. Web Based Communities, Vol. 3, No. 4, pp.386–403. Biographical notes: Christo El Morr received his PhD from the University of Technology of Compiègne, France in 1997. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Health Informatics at York University in Toronto, Canada. His research interests are in health information systems, e-health, Electronic Health Records (EHR), information systems integration, software engineering, Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) and telemedicine. Jalal Kawash received his PhD from the University of Calgary, Canada in 2000. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the American University of Sharjah in the UAE and is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary in Canada. His research interests are in distributed systems, mobile virtual communities and computing education.

Copyright © 2007 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Mobile virtual communities research

1

387

Introduction

Over the past few years, the world has been witnessing a constant proliferation of mobile devices and wireless technologies. This proliferation is also complemented by constant advancements in the processing capabilities of these devices and supportive software environments. By the end of 2005, estimates were that manufacturers would “have shipped 300 to 400 million more Java phones”, and that in 2005, 300 to 400 different phone models were capable of running Java, and “there are 150 mobile operators that support Java” (Mobile Monday Website, 2005). Ovum Search estimates that Java powers “over 1 billion mobile phones and other handheld devices” (Java.com website, 2006). Moreover, wireless bandwidth is also being constantly improved as some companies have started offering third-generation (3G) networks. With this proliferation of mobile devices and wireless technologies, users are expected to practise their roles in online communities while they are on the move. New virtual meeting places are being created, with no clear sight of an end. Therefore, a new form of online community with mobile users can only be a natural result of the mobile and wireless technology advancement and embracement. Such communities are called Mobile Virtual Communities (MVCs) and they continue to form a very promising research field. However, following the stock market crash, the way the service providers approached mobile services research and development changed after 2001. They were less willing to invest in nonproven profit-generating models. Despite this huge and rapid adoption of wireless handheld devices, MVCs have not been as successful as ‘nonmobile’ online communities. For example, only the mobile gaming industry has taken advantage of the huge adoption of Java-enabled mobile devices (Mobile Monday Website, 2005). There could be several factors that are hindering the wide formation of MVCs. The lack of ‘killer’ mobile applications could be a major reason. MVCs that exist today are of a ‘limited’ nature. They are limited to allowing mobile users to receive stock quotes, news headlines, reminders and so forth. The search for the killer application is definitely a worldwide concern, and this explains the application-driven research in the field. Telecom companies have recently started offering 3G services. Yet the lack of content and of support of killer applications will continue to be a concern, especially if the 3G mobile phone technology fully matures. Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) operators continue to look for killer applications that will increase revenues from 3G mobile subscribers (Ahonen and Barret, 2002). We believe that MVC enablers are candidates for such killer applications. Mobility has a tremendous effect on the nature of the tools that enable mobile user participation in a community; one such studied aspect includes the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) needs for mobile devices. Studies suggest that in mobile Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), mobility enforces constraints on HCI so that new interaction styles should be created (Kristoffersen and Ljungberg, 1999). These styles are characterised by no or little visual attention and by the use of audio feedback. Mobile users are working in a more context-sensitive environment than nonmobile users. Hence, location has a special importance in mobile systems, and one should consider the impact of the context in the design of interaction techniques (Dix et al., 2000). Therefore, from a community perspective, the participation of a mobile user in a community has an impact on the awareness tools, the roles that can be conducted in the

388

C. El Morr and J. Kawash

community, as well as the sociability aspects of such a community. Mobile users behave differently from nonmobile users; mobile users are usually on the move, not necessarily linked to a local or wide area network, such as the internet. However, they can be connected through other kinds of networks, such as the phone network, including the Short Message Service (SMS). Different aspects of mobility have been researched during the last few years, dealing with the vision of MVCs, the appropriate technologies, the appropriate user interface, the intelligent mobile agents’ usefulness, as well as a myriad of applications ranging from leisure to health, and trying to find a solution to security, privacy and trust issues as well as the profitable business models. In this paper, we provide a categorisation of the state of research on MVCs. We synthesise the research into domains in Section 2. We classify MVC research into seven domains, based on their research motivation. These are technology, work, education, entertainment, lifestyle, health and security. Section 2 also discusses the research topics and interests, whether technology centred, user centred or business centred. Categories of adopted MVCs are also synthesised based on different dimensions: public versus private; Location-Based (LB) versus non-LB; and synchronous versus asynchronous. Section 3 concludes the paper by providing future research perspectives in the MVC field.

2

Classification of current research

Classifying the recent MVC research into domains of activities is a difficult task because such a classification can be performed from different angles and with different objectives. We choose three different angles that enable us to better understand the MVC research field. These are the domains of research activity (Subsection 2.1), the investigated research topics (Subsection 2.2) and the categories of MVCs (Subsection 2.3).

2.1 Domains MVC research can be classified into seven general domains, presented in Table 1. Table 1

Domains of MVC research

Domains

Fields of research

Technology

Infrastructure

(HW/SW techniques)

User interface Space Agents Wearable devices

Work

Mobile work

Education

Mobile education

Entertainment

Mobile gaming Mobile music Interactive TV

Mobile virtual communities research Table 1

389

Domains of MVC research (continued)

Domains

Fields of research

Lifestyle

Location-based services: – Collaborative visiting in a city – Collaborative student environment – Location-based weblog – Collaborative organisation of leisure time – Mobile friends’ discussion – Organisation of tourism journeys

Health

Mobile support

Security

Surveillance

2.1.1 Technology One domain of MVC research is concerned with the appropriate hardware and software infrastructure for a streamlined mobile experience. This includes infrastructure, user interface, space, agents and wearable devices. Infrastructure: This research is interested in the performance of Wi-Fi connections (Wu, 2004) and approaches that help service providers collect current requirements from community members and permit community members to use the appropriate service (Kaji et al., 2002). It is also concerned with platform design (Pedro Sousa and Garlan, 2002), including the search for a new paradigm in accessing computing resources, network services and personalised computing environments that are accessible from anywhere (Li and Leung, 1997). User Interface (UI): UI research studies the effect of interface design and artefacts such as sound on collaboration and learning (Cole and Stanton, 2003). Rantanen et al.’s (2004) focus was on community requirements analysis and UI design; they provided solutions to shortcomings in previous work in the area of location-based messaging, such as using metaphors and colour. Other work focused on the UI design needed to represent context information, such as maps, user activity, environmental information and device activity (Keranen et al., 2003). Others investigated the very nature of handheld UI in an attempt to rethink the UI design strategy and minimise the interaction with a server (Kawash, 2003; 2004). Space: The contexts of space and place were also an early subject of research in mobility. Andersen (2001) outlined futuristic expectations concerning pervasive computing and space. He argued that future computational devices would have a higher degree of autonomy and tried to predict the interaction scenarios between moving devices and stationary ones based on their habitats (a combination of three spaces – the physical, the informational and the conceptual). The design requirement and usefulness from the user perspective were also studied by many researchers. It was suggested that mobile and ubiquitous computing would change the concept of space and influence the structure of activities. This is contrasted with the traditional places where expectations about the structure of activity were rigid but simple (Agre, 2001). Dix et al. (2000) investigated the

390


emerging design space for a new class of advanced cooperative applications and investigated the importance of location in mobile systems. They also studied the different forms of interaction that may need to be supported. Tamminen et al. (2004) investigated mainly the influence of the context on how people construct personal and group spaces. Others, such as Weilenmann and Leuchovius (2004), argue that location-based services should not just deliver geographical coordinates, but should support the existing user-positioning practice and describe the location in ways that are relevant to the users. Agents: Intelligent agents research is another field of research in relation to MVCs. Some research projects engage in the design of applications related to elderly support (Camarinha-Matos et al., 2003), or of a security model in an agent-based community (Page et al., 2004); others explore the usefulness of intelligent agents to match users having mutual concerns and interests (Raybourn et al., 2002). Though these projects do not touch on the mobility factor of communities to see the particular needs of such environments, it is clear that mobile agents alleviate some technical problems in mobile environments, especially disconnection and low bandwidth, and thus provide enhanced efficiency (Spyrou et al., 2004). Wearable devices: More recently, researchers have predicted that wearable devices would augment social networks. Some suggest design methodologies for prototyping wearable community systems (Kortuem and Segall, 2003), while others are investigating methodologies and software platforms to develop wearable communities (Kortuem, 2002).

2.1.2 Work Some research investigated how mobility changed the way people conduct day-to-day business. Questions have been raised on the influence mobility has on the space, time and context of a workplace (Churchill and Muno, 2001), as well as on its impact on boundaries between work and life. For example, since PDAs are not being used just for work but also for lifestyle management, there are direct implications on the design of mobile devices in order to provide accommodation for lifestyle-related uses such as informal on the fly, note taking, or list making, as suggested by Geisler and Golden (2003).

2.1.3 Education Other researchers investigated how educational institutions can use mobility to enhance the educational experience through role playing, storytelling (Cole and Stanton, 2003) and field trips (Farooq et al., 2002). Mobile community proved to be an added value in some educational setups since it can trigger further educational experience and investigation by making data available while students are on the move. In some cases, the mobile education community component was limited to information and data sharing rather than collaboration and notification. Others built an MVC where user profiles were modelled and personalisation, awareness and matchmaking facilities were included by means of contextual information (Schubert and Koch, 2003). Both synchronous and asynchronous communications were used.


391

2.1.4 Entertainment Entertainment is a very promising domain of MVC research and applications, particularly the gaming industry (IGDA, 2005). Research was conducted to test mobile gaming as an integrator of technologies and to examine regulatory complexities (Finn, 2005). Other research tested the efficacy of physiological measures as evaluators of collaborative entertainment technologies (Mandryk and Inkpen, 2004). Nevertheless, a community for mobile collaborative gaming did not seem to be on the research agenda in these studies. The success of the Apple iPod portable digital audio players is an indication of promising applications of mobile music/sound communities, forming a very recent research domain (Carter and Fisher, 2004; 2005). The iTV is another field of entertainment where communities may play a role(CHI2006 Workshop on iTV, 2006).

2.1.5 Lifestyle Location-based services are a prominent sector of MVC research activities and the future expectations of these are also paramount (Tasch and Brakel, 2004). Lifestyle location-based research projects include location-based services in a city (Brown et al., 2005; Silverstone and Sujon, 2005), geographic annotation in a context sensitive collaborative student environment (Burrell and Gay, 2002), and location-based weblogs (Carter et al., 2004). Examples of life-style MVCs include communities that organise the members’ leisure time (Hampe et al., 2004; Schubert and Hampe, 2005) or permit them to keep in touch (Burak and Sharon, 2004), and communities for tourism journeys (Stein et al., 2005; Pospischil and Bonek, 2000). All of these disparate applications make use of locative media or contextual information (Nova, 2004). SMS usage for rendezvousing has been investigated (Axup et al., 2005) and conclusions have been drawn on the usability issues raised when a service originally designed for individuals (SMS) is used by a community.

2.1.6 Health Health research is a very recent and rare field of application and is meant to play a pivotal role in e-monitoring and e-healthcare in general. COSMOS is the project of reference in the field (Leimeister et al., 2004a–b; Ebner et al., 2004; Krcmar et al., 2002; Arnold et al., 2004; 2003). COSMOS creates virtual communities of cancer patients, and is working towards mobility support (Leimeister et al., 2002a–b; 2003). Other healthcare research developed projects to support mobile elderly people but did not include a community factor (Abascal and Civit, 2001). Others involved online health communities and looked into the dynamics of online group interaction, but did not consider mobility factors (Maloney-Krichmar and Preece, 2005).

2.1.7 Security Security is the last research domain, according to our classification. Security research focuses on trust (Abdul-Rahman and Hailes, 2000), security (Page et al., 2004), or privacy, which is mainly related to location and context disclosure in general (Consolvo et al., 2005), and it is not limited to MVCs.

392


2.2 Research topics and interests The research topics or questions investigated can themselves be categorised into three general interests. We can distinguish between technology-centred, user-centred, and business-centred interests. These categories are not mutually exclusive, as indicated in Figure 1. For example trust, security, privacy, and personalisation are shared motivations by business interest as well as by user and technology interests. While the user interface is an interest shared by the technology concern as well as by the ergonomic user-centered concern. Business models are definitely a business interest but a technology interest as well. Finally, marketing is a concern shared by the business interest and the user-centred interest. Figure 1

Interdependence among the different interests User -Centred Interest

Technology - Centred Interest

Platform design Development framework Bandwidth limits Intelligent agents

User interface

Behaviour

Trust Privacy Security Personalisation

Business models

Marketing

Profitability

Business-Centred Interest

2.2.1 Technology-centred interest The technology-centred interest involves research in the areas of platform design, development frameworks, bandwidth limits and intelligent agents. Platform design: This involves researching the design of a platform that supports mobility and/or the use of mobile agents in a mobile environment. Platform design replies to the need to investigate the hardware and software requirements during mobility (Wu, 2004; Li and Leung, 1997; Kaji et al., 2002).


393

Development framework: The research approach in this area is rare and is an attempt to examine the theoretical basis of mobility and to provide a framework of orientation that guides the design of interactive mobile systems in terms of awareness tools. It also suggests some mechanisms to develop mobile applications (Dix et al., 2000; Pedro Sousa and Garlan, 2002; Cheung, 2005; Raento et al., 2005). Bandwidth limits: This area of research is interested in overcoming the bandwidth limits of mobile networks and in conceiving new protocols to access computing resources and appropriate network services (Li and Leung, 1997; Kaji et al., 2002; Spyrou et al., 2004; Wu, 2004; Peng et al., 2004). Intelligent agents: Research in this field suggests that the known benefit of mobile agents, which consists of bringing the computation to data rather than data to computation, has a tremendous impact on mobile network technology since it helps to overcome shortages in a mobile network such as low bandwidth and short network disconnections. Besides, this field of research addresses the security models needed for an agent-based community (Raybourn et al., 2002; Camarinha-Matos et al., 2003; Page et al., 2004; Spyrou et al., 2004; Malik et al., 2005; O’Sullivan and Studdert, 2005; Chhetri et al., 2006).

2.2.2 User-centred interest MVC research driven by the user-centred interest comprises UI, behaviour, personalisation, privacy, security and trust. UI: The UI research area, a very common subject in virtual communities, has special attention in a mobile setup because of the display limitations of mobile devices. Research in this area ranges from concentrating on the user requirements for a friendly interface (with the corresponding artefacts) to suggesting new interface-rendering models and a development process (Cole and Stanton, 2003; Rantanen et al., 2004; Keranen et al., 2003; Kawash, 2003; 2004; Glissmann et al., 2005). Behaviour: The study of user behaviour is the matter of concern in this research area. The usage pattern of the mobile device is tracked and analysed in order to deduce the kind of services mostly needed (Schubert and Koch, 2003; Demumieux and Loquin, 2005; Forest and Arhippainen, 2005; Häkkilä and Isomursu, 2005). Personalisation: How to make the mobile services fit the user expectations, his/her profile, and usage pattern is the question directing the research in this area (Schubert and Koch, 2003; Colbert, 2005; Messner and Herrmann, 2005). Privacy: This is currently a major concern in many areas. Mobile users want to be able to use the services of a mobile device in a context such as MVCs and to preserve their private data at the same time. Researchers are suggesting solutions that address this concern (Burak and Sharon, 2004; Consolvo et al., 2005; Häkkilä and Chatfield, 2005). Data security: Who says privacy says security. Data in MVCs do not only involve user data but also the user’s location. How to preserve security while providing a mobile service is the quest of this research area. We have noticed that this concern was mainly related to mobile-agents-based communities (Camarinha-Matos et al., 2003; Page et al., 2004; Halpert, 2005).

394


Trust: Trust is a key factor in the success or failure of any community or even a simple transaction. Furthermore, in a virtual and personal environment such as MVCs, trust is a decisive factor for members that have little or no information about other members. Research in this area is striving to enable trust through new models (Abdul-Rahman and Hailes, 2000; Xiong and Liu, 2003; Ali Shaikh and Omer, 2005).

2.2.3 Business-centred interest The business-centred interest is concerned with marketing (Kurkovsky et al., 2005) and finding the right business model that will prove to be lucrative for the communication companies. Models related to the leisure industries, such as Mobile Community Online Reservation (MCOR) (Hampe et al., 2004) and other user support communities (Schubert and Hampe, 2005), were found to be promising fields of investment and promising business models.

2.3 Categories of MVCs Collaborative communities in general were the subject of different categorisations (Honglei, 2004). Mobility added a new dimension on the classification scheme. In the following we will classify the types of virtual communities in general (Figure 2), and then we will give a classification of the MVCs based on the services they provide (Figure 3). Figure 2

Types of collaborative communities

Virtual

Physical Still

Mobile

Collaboration Notification

Mobile virtual communities research Figure 3

395

Classification of the MVCs based on available services

Noncontextual

Contextual Public

Synchronous

Asynchronous

Private We suggest that communities, in general, can be classified based on three factors: 1

Degree of virtualisation (physical/virtual): Communities can be physical, meaning members are meeting in a physical place to practise their roles; or they can be virtual, meaning the meeting place is virtual.

2

Degree of mobility (still/mobile): The members can be immobile, in one place, or can be mobile and on the move.

3

Degree of cooperation (notification/collaboration): Notification is a form of cooperation that is limited to members sending messages to each other, a clear example of which is the Kawash et al. (2005) model, while the term ‘collaboration’ specifies the members cooperating in building a common project (Turban et al., 2002). Figure 2 portrays this categorisation.

We can classify MVCs into categories based on three criteria: 1

Degree of ‘openness’ (private/public): A private MVC is open to its members only; communication can happen only between the community members. A public virtual community is open to nonmembers, who can participate in communication occurring within the community. For example, newsgroups can be considered ‘open’ communities, while private mail-groups, where communication occurs only between group members, can be considered ‘closed’ communities.

2

Degree of contextual information present (contextual/noncontextual): Contextual information refers to data that reflect the context in which the member is immersed. Such information can be reflected by one or more of these three – location, speed, or direction. For example, newsgroups and mail-groups are not context-aware communities, while tourism-based communities are.

396 3

C. El Morr and J. Kawash Degree of interaction they permit (synchronous/asynchronous): In a synchronous interaction, the members are required to be simultaneously present when interacting. In an asynchronous interaction, the communication of members occurs in a deferred way. A well-known example of a synchronous community is a chatting community, which at the same time can be public or private (private chat rooms). Billboard communities are examples of asynchronous communities.

Figure 3 shows a model of this categorisation.

3

Perspectives

The research papers cited in previous sections of this work allow us to draw and suggest some perspectives regarding the research in the field of MVCs.

3.1 User interface With the exception of a few cases (Hampe et al., 2004; Rantanen et al., 2004; Kawash, 2003), most research papers that investigated MVCs did not engage in exploring the UI problems incurred in mobility. UI requirements in MVCs is still a research domain that needs to be further explored. One important factor that remains to be considered is user expectations in terms of usability and personalisation. Another research question is UI portability. Apart from the use of XUI (Xoetrope Website, 2006), UI portability will continue to be a challenge, given the exploding mobile device market, the emerging interactive TV and other ubiquitous technologies.

3.2 Mobile agent support Even though mobile agent technologies can be used for mobile communities, we pointed out earlier in this paper that the work concerning mobile agents mainly dealt with the platform architecture and security issues. Furthermore, some researchers dealt with agents to provide services for mobile but independent (not necessarily linked to a community) users (Moreno and Isern, 2002). More recent papers suggest using mobile agents in support of nonmobile communities of practice (Silva Santos et al., 2005). They fall short of tackling the mobility component, from a mobile-agent-based community perspective or from a mobile-agent platform design perspective. Developments in these directions are yet to be made.

3.3 User requirements The behaviour of mobile users is likely to be different from that of nonmobile users, and the communication means available to these separate categories of users are not necessarily the same. The research focus on technology was usually disconnected from the users’ requirements elicitation. Yet mobility is not a need that is well defined; it is not a de facto need as shown in some papers’ findings (Burak and Sharon, 2004; Tasch and Brakel, 2004).


397

Research in mobility seems to repeat the mistakes of the early information systems development, especially in the medical field, which ignored the users’ expectations during the analysis and design phases. Research projects taking into account users’ expectations seem to be a more appropriate approach to enable mobility. Regardless of the orientation of an MVC (business, social or otherwise) the user-centred design is still a necessity in terms of user-requirements elicitation, as has been shown in research projects analysing the tools needed for mobile system analysts in a requirements engineering environment (Seyff et al., 2004), or examining the interface requirements for mobile TV (Knoche and McCarthy, 2005). Moreover, we believe that usage pattern detection will foster user-centred design as shown in recent papers analysing usage patterns on mobile phones (Demumieux and Loquin, 2005) or cultural aspects related to mobile services usage (Forest and Arhippainen, 2005).

3.4 Industry collaboration Experience with industry collaboration shows the most interesting results. These include interesting insights into user behaviour (services used, personalisation, collaboration tools, etc.), user expectations and some prediction on the financial viability of the business models. Research that aims to create profitable e-business models for MVCs is another promising research area especially in Management Information Systems (MIS). In any profitable business model, building users’ trust (privacy and confidentiality) remains a major issue and more research activities that address this issue are needed. Other pending issues include: •

the size of the critical mass (the number of consumers) needed to make the business profitable

•

how willing users are to pay for services

•

how and if privacy and related issues can be controlled

•

whether there will be appropriate laws and regulations to control illegal actions.

These questions still need more research as the development of mobile technologies continues. However, they should not impede the formulation of MVCs.

3.5 Developing ‘social profitability’ Social profitability is an unexplored research track. Building models to ‘prove’ or estimate the social profitability of MVCs continues to be a challenge. One can think of building social indicators that provide a measurement of the social impact of MVCs.

3.6 Ubiquitous computing The ubiquitous computing paradigm is starting to gain visibility in community building (Churchill et al., 2004; Vogiazou et al., 2005) and is a promising perspective in MVC research.

398


3.7 Future applications In the future, we expect mobile commerce (m-commerce) to play a pivotal role driven by commercial applications. Buying and selling transactions will be eventually carried out over mobile devices if technical limitations related to the display and user interface will be overcome. The following are some suggestions about mobile services that can support the creation of virtual communities: Mobile Market Research Communities will allow product testing on the spot and allow the members to share their experiences, likes and dislikes. This information can be shared to other members of the community, thus giving instantaneous ratings of the products based on the consumer experience. Such business orientation is already online (Turban et al., 2005), though mobility will elevate it to a higher degree of availability owing to mobile notification. A variety of locative media or context-based applications can be developed to allow context-aware community members to share information of common interest, which can range from shopping experiences to scientific conferences and workshops running around a member’s location. A shopper can be notified of the location of businesses, offers and other members in a shopping mall, and can meet them or ask for advice. A mobile-shopping virtual community can also be conceived in this domain, where online shopping and e-commerce are further enhanced. One can also be interested in specific domain activities (such as cultural, social and scientific) that are running in one’s region. A member will therefore have access to notification from other members about the occurrence of a particular event or point of interest to the community. One example could be in a university campus where students can be aware of others interested in a specific subject, such as a discussion, homework, or need/availability of mentors.

4

Conclusion

In conclusion, the exponential growth of technology has placed significant computing power in mobile and small devices. Furthermore, wireless communication technology has resulted in a new form of community, namely MVCs. These MVCs have the potential to bring together more groups of people with common interests, since they allow members to practise their roles while they are on the move. Although little research has been conducted in understanding how network providers can turn these services into profits and what the users’ requirements and the acceptance trends are, this new integration of mobility with the virtual community paradigm is very promising and is inevitable. This trend constitutes a rich research mine for future discovery and development. Finally, we note that flexibility and social indifference may be the two, perhaps contradictory, faces of ‘virtuality’. The flexibility induced by a virtual meeting place with unlimited proximity and the ability to practise community roles on the move and while performing other daily functions can offer MVCs an enormous wealth of social formations. However, virtuality is not likely to support strong community cohesion. In general, virtual community memberships can be short lived and virtual communities suffer from weak member commitments. A common interest does not necessarily lead to member loyalty and long-lasting cooperation. Ubiquity of MVCs is a reconciliation factor


399

between these two faces of ‘virtuality’ and is the drive to keep MVCs going. While a common interest can keep a member attached to the community only for a rather short period of time, community ‘hopping’, where members frequently join and leave different communities, can be a sustaining power for MVCs. This is especially true given the mass of potential members. In general, we expect many virtual communities to be subject to frequent constituency changes and high member turnout. This is even magnified in MVCs, where membership in a community can be due to a location- and time-sensitive need, which can be short lived. However, as members change their locations and as time changes, differing interests and needs spring out, necessitating cooperation with other community members. Hence, new memberships replace the obsolete ones quickly. In fact, while weak and short-term commitment makes virtual communities ‘fluffy’, it is also what makes them flexible and capable of timeless adaptation to constituency changes. After all, we should not expect the same type and degree of bonding from virtual meeting places as those from more traditional and more physical places.

Acknowledgement We are thankful for the reviewers’ comments, which helped us improve the quality of the paper.

References Abascal, J. and Civit, A. (2001) ‘Universal access to mobile telephony as a way to enhance the autonomy of elderly people’, Proceedings of the Workshop on Universal Accessibility of Ubiquitous Computing AUAUC’01, 22–25 May. Abdul-Rahman, A. and Hailes, S. (2000) ‘Supporting trust in virtual communities’, Proceedings Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Maui, Hawaii, 4–7 January, Vol. 33. Agre, P. (2001) ‘Changing places: contexts of awareness in computing’, Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 16, Nos. 2–4, pp.177–192. Ahonen, T. and Barret, J. (Eds.) (2002) Services for UMTS: Creating Killer Applications in 3G, New York, John Wiley & Sons. Ali Shaikh, A. and Omer, R. (2005) ‘Formalising trust for online communities’, Proceedings of the Fourth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems AAMAS ’05, pp.1245–1246. Andersen, P.B. (2001) ‘Pervasive computing and space’, Organizational Semiotics, Springer, pp.133–152. Arnold, Y., Daum, M. and Krcmar, H. (2004) ‘Virtual communities in health care: roles, requirements and restrictions’, Multikonferenz Wirtschaftsinformatik (MKWI), Universität Duisburg-Essen, 9–11 March. Arnold, Y., Leimeister, J.M. and Krcmar, H. (2003) ‘CoPEP: a development process model for community platforms for cancer patients’, Proceedings of the XIth European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS). Axup, J., Viller, S. and Bidwell, N. (2005) ‘Usability of a mobile, group communication prototype while rendezvousing’, CTS’05, International Symposium on Collaborative Technologies and Systems.

400


Brown, B., Chalmers, M., Bell, M., MacColl, I., Hall, M. and Rudman, P. (2005) ‘Sharing the square: collaborative visiting in the city streets’, Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). Burak, A. and Sharon, T. (2004) ‘Usage patterns of FriendZone – mobile location based community services’, The 3rd Inter. Conf. on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia. Burrell, J. and Gay, G.K. (2002) ‘E-graffiti: evaluating real-world use of a context-aware system’, Special Issue on Universal Usability, Interacting with Computers, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp.301–312. Camarinha-Matos, L.M., Castolo, O. and Rosas, J. (2003) ‘A multi-agent based platform for virtual communities in elderly care’, 9th IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation, Lisbon, Portugal, 16–19 September. Carter, W. and Fisher, S. (2004) ‘Mobile sound communities’, ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology, pp.355–356. Carter, W. and Fisher, S. (2005) ‘Mobile sound communities’, Proceedings of Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE). Carter, W., Fisher, S., Furmanski, T., Macdonald, K. and Millican, T. (2004) International Conference on Virtual Systems and MultiMedia. Cheung, R. (2005) ‘An adaptive middleware infrastructure incorporating fuzzy logic for mobile computing’, International Conference on Next Generation Web Services Practices NWeSP, pp.449–451. Chhetri, M.B., Price, R., Krishnaswamy, S. and Loke, S.W. (2006) Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences HICSS ‘06, p.45a. Churchill, E., Girgensohn, A., Nelson, L. and Lee, A. (2004) ‘Information cities: blending digital and physical spaces for ubiquitous community participation’, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 47, No. 2, pp.39–44. Churchill, E. and Muno, A. (2001) ‘Work/Place: mobile technologies and arenas of activity’, SIGGROUP Bulletin, December, Vol. 22, No. 3. Colbert, M. (2005) ‘User experience of communication before and during rendezvous: interim results’, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp.134–141. Cole, H. and Stanton, D. (2003) ‘Designing mobile technologies to support co-present collaboration’, Pers. Ubiquit. Comput. Consolvo, S., Smith, I.E., Matthews, T., Lamarca, A., Tabert, J. and Powledge, P. (2005) ‘Location disclosure to social relations: why, when, & what people want to share’, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’05), pp.81–90. Demumieux, R. and Loquin, P. (2005) ‘Gather customer’s real usage on mobile phones’, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices & Services MobileHCI ‘05, pp.267–270. Dix, A., Rodden, T., Davies, N., Trevor, J., Friday, A. and Palfreyman, K. (2000) ‘Exploiting space and location as a design framework for interactive mobile systems’, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), Vol. 7, No. 3. Ebner, W., Leimeister, J.M. and Krcmar, H. (2004) ‘Trust in virtual communities: design and implementation of trust-enabling functionalities’, Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 37). Farooq, U., Schafer, W., Rosson, M. and Caroll, J.M. (2002) ‘M-Education: bridging the gap of mobile and desktop computing’, IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technology in Education (WMTE’02). Finn, M. (2005) ‘Gaming goes mobile: issues and implications’, Australian Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society, Vol. 3, No. 1. Forest, F. and Arhippainen, L. (2005) ‘Social acceptance of proactive mobile services: observing and anticipating cultural aspects by a sociology of user experience method’, The 2005 Joint Conference on Smart Objects and Ambient Intelligence: Innovative Context-aware Services: Usages and Technologies sOc-EUSAI ‘05, pp.117–122.


401

Geisler, C. and Golden, A. (2003) ‘Mobile technologies at the boundary of work and life’, National Communication Association, 2003 Convention. Glissmann, S., Smolnik, S., Schierholz, R., Kolbe, L. and Brenner, W. (2005) ‘Proposition of an m-business procedure model for the development of mobile user interfaces’, ICMB 2005. International Conference on Mobile Business, pp.308–314. Häkkilä, J. and Chatfield, C. (2005) ‘“It’s like if you opened someone else’s letter”: user perceived privacy and social practices with SMS communication’, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices & Services MobileHCI ‘05, pp.219–222. Häkkilä, J. and Isomursu, M. (2005) ‘User experiences on location-aware mobile services’, Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group (CHISIG) of Australia on Computer-Human Interaction: Citizens Online: Considerations for Today and the Future OZCHI ‘05, pp.1–4. Halpert, B.J. (2005) ‘Authentication interface evaluation and design for mobile devices’, Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Conference on Information Security Curriculum Development InfoSecCD ‘05, pp.112–117. Hampe, J.F., Schubert, P. and Schneider, F. (2004) ‘Mobile community support: a mobile reservation system for the leisure industry’, 17th Bled eCommerce Conference eGlobal, Bled, Slovenia, 21–23 June. Honglei, L. (2004) ‘Virtual community studies: a literature review, synthesis and research agenda’, Proceedings of the Americas Conference on Information Systems, New York, August. IGDA Online Games SIG (2005) ‘Mobile games white paper’, Game Developers Conference. Investigating new user experience challenges in iTV (2006) Mobility & Sociability Workshop, Conference for Human-Computer Interaction, CHI, http://soc.kuleuven.be/com/mediac/ chi2006workshop/organizers.htm. Java.com website (2006) http://www.java.com/en/about (accessed 3 March 2006). Kaji, N., Ragab, K., Ono, T. and Mori, K. (2002) ‘Autonomous synchronization technology for achieving real time property in service oriented community system’, Proc 2nd Inter. Work. on Autonomous Decentralized System. Kawash, J. (2003) ‘XML user interfaces for collaborative mobile virtual communities’, Proceedings of International Conference WWW/Internet’2003, pp.342–349. Kawash, J. (2004) ‘Declarative user interfaces for handheld devices’, Winter International Symposium on Information and Communication Technology, pp.410–415. Kawash, J., El Morr, C., Charaf, W. and Taha, H. (2005) ‘Building mobile virtual communities for public transport awareness’, 2nd International Conference on Mobile Technology Applications, and Systems (Mobility’05), Guangzhou, China, 15–17 November. Keranen, H., Rantakokko, T. and Mantyjarvi, J. (2003) ‘Sharing multimedia and context information within online communities using mobile terminals’, ICME. Knoche, H. and McCarthy, J.D. (2005) ‘Design requirements for mobile TV’, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices & Services MobileHCI ‘05, pp.69–76. Kortuem, G. (2002) ‘A methodology and software platform for building wearable communities’, PhD thesis, University of Oregon. Kortuem, G. and Segall, Z. (2003) ‘Wearable communities: augmenting social networks with wearable computers’, IEEE Pervasive Computing, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp.71–78. Krcmar, H., Arnold, Y., Daum, M. and Leimeister, J.M. (2002) ‘Virtual communities in health care: the case of “Krebsgemeinschaft.de”’, SIGGROUP Bulletin, December, Vol. 23, No. 3. Kristoffersen, S. and Ljungberg, F. (1999) ‘Making place to make IT work: empirical explorations of HCI for mobile CSCW’, International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work, Phoenix, Arizona, United States, ACM Press.

402


Kurkovsky, S., Zanev, V. and Kurkovsky, A. (2005) ‘SMMART: using context-awareness in m-commerce’, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices & Services MobileHCI ‘05, pp.383–384. Leimeister, J.M., Daum, M. and Krcmar, H. (2002a) ‘Mobile communication and computing in healthcare’, Proceedings of the Tokyo Mobile Business Roundtable. Leimeister, J.M., Daum, M. and Krcmar, H. (2002b) ‘Mobile virtual healthcare communities: an approach to community engineering for cancer patient’, Proceedings of the Xth European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS). Leimeister, J.M., Daum, M. and Krcmar, H. (2003) ‘Towards M-Communities – the case of COSMOS healthcare’, Proceedings of the 36th Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS’03). Leimeister, J.M., Daum, M. and Krcmar, H. (2004a) ‘Towards mobile communities for cancer patients: the case of Krebsgemeinschaft.de’, Int. J. Web Based Communities, Vol. 1, No. 1. Leimeister, J.M., Sidiras, P. and Krcmar, H. (2004b) ‘Success factors of virtual communities from the perspective of members and operators: an empirical study’, Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Li, Y. and Leung, V. (1997) ‘Supporting personal mobility computing over the internet’, ACM Mobile Computing and Communication Review, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp.23–31. Malik, S.S., Qureshi, N.A., Ali, A., Ahmad, H.F. and Suguri, H. (2005) Proceedings of the 2005 International Conference on Active Media Technology, 2005. (AMT 2005), pp.393–396. Maloney-Krichmar, D. and Preece, J. (2005) ‘A multilevel analysis of sociability, usability, and community dynamics in an online health community’, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), Vol. 12, No. 2, pp.201–232. Mandryk, R. and Inkpen, K. (2004) ‘Physiological indicators for the evaluation of co-located collaborative play’, ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, pp.102–111. Messner, P. and Herrmann, T. (2005) ‘How to set-up a corporate user experience team: key success factors, strategic positioning, and sustainable organisational implementations’, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices & Services, pp.371–372. Mobile Monday Website (2005) http://www.mobilemonday.net/ (accessed 4 April 2005). Moreno, A. and Isern, D. (2002) ‘A first step towards providing health-care agent-based services to mobile users’, Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pp.589–590. Nova, N. (2004) ‘Locative media: a literature review’, Craft Research Report 2, Ecole Ploytechinc Fédérale De Lausuanne, February. O’Sullivan, T. and Studdert, R. (2005) ‘Agent technology and reconfigurable computing for mobile devices’, Proceedings of the 2005 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing SAC ‘05, pp.963–969. Page, J., Zaalavsky, A. and Indrawan, M. (2004) ‘A buddy model of security for mobile agent communities operating in pervasive scenarios’, Australian Information Security Workshop (AISW). Pedro Sousa, J. and Garlan, D. (2002) ‘Aura: an architectural framework for user mobility in ubiquitous computing environments, software architecture: system design, development, and maintenance’, Proceedings of the 3rd Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture, (WICSA3), Montreal, Canada, August, pp.29–43. Peng, M., He, X. and Liu, J. (2004) ‘The application of multi-agent and CORBA in mobile-GPS system’, The Fourth International Conference on Computer and Information Technology, CIT ‘04, pp.503–508. Pospischil, G. and Bonek, E. (2000) ‘UMTS applications development – designing a “killer application”’, in S. Tekinay (Ed.) Next Generation Wireless Networks, Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, November.


403

Raento, M., Oulasvirta, A. and Petit, R. (2005) ‘Toivonen, HcontextPhone – a prototyping platform for context-aware mobile applications’, IEEE. Pervasive Computing, Vol. 4, No. 2, pp.51–59. Rantanen, M., Oulasvirta, A., Blom, J., Tiitta, S. and Mantyla, M. (2004) ‘InfoRadar: group and public messaging in the mobile context’, NordiCHI’04, 23–27 October, Tampere, Finland. Raybourn, E., Davies, J. and Kings, N. (2002) ‘Future directions in supporting virtual communities of practice: designing tacit culture in adaptive collaborative knowledge sharing environments’, The 6th World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (SCI’2002), July. Schubert, P. and Hampe, J.F. (2005) ‘Business models for virtual communities’, Proceedings of the 38th Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. Schubert, P. and Koch, M. (2003) ‘Collaboration platforms for virtual student community’, Proc. Hawaii Inter. Conf. on System Sciences, (HICSS-36). Seyff, N., Grunbacher, P., Maiden, N. and Tosar, A. (2004) ‘Requirements engineering tools go mobile’, Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering ICSE ‘04. Silva Santos, L.O.B., Guizzardi, R.S.S. and Sinderen, M.V. (2005) ‘Norms, social laws and social structures: agent-oriented context-aware platforms supporting communities of practice in health care’, Proceedings of the Fourth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems AAMAS ‘05, pp.1287–1288. Silverstone, R. and Sujon, Z. (2005) ‘Urban tapestries: experimental ethnography, technological identities and place’, An LSE Electronic Working Paper, February, http://www.lse.ac.uk/ collections/media@lse/pdf/EWP7.pdf. Spyrou, C., Samaras, G., Pitoura, E. and Evripidou, P. (2004) ‘Mobile agents for wireless computing: the convergence of wireless computational models with mobile-agent technologies’, Mobile Networks and Applications, Vol. 9, No. 5, pp.517–528. Stein, A., Hawking, P. and Sharma, P. (2005) ‘A classification of u-commerce location based tourism applications’, AUSWeb05, The Eleventh Australasian World Wide Web Conference, 2–6 July. Tamminen, S., Oulasvirta, A., Toiskallio, K. and Kankainen, A. (2004) ‘Understanding mobile contexts’, Pervasive Ubiquitous Computing, Vol. 8, pp.135–143. Tasch, A. and Brakel, O. (2004) ‘Location based community services. New services for a new type of web communities’, Proceedings of the IADIS Conference on Web Based Communities, Lisbon, 24–26 March. Turban, E., King, D., Lee, J., Warkentin, M. and Chung, H.M. (2002) Electronic Commerce 2002: A Managerial Perspective, Prentice Hall, pp.242–246. Turban, E., King, D., Viehland, D. and Lee, J. (2005) Electronic Commerce: A Managerial Perspective, 4th ed., Pearson. Vogiazou, Y., Eisenstadt, M., Dzbor, M. and Komzak, J. (2005) ‘From buddyspace to CitiTag: large-scale symbolic presence for community building and spontaneous play’, Proceedings of the 2005 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing SAC ‘05, pp.1600–1606. Weilenmann, A. and Leuchovius, P. (2004) ‘“I’m waiting where we met last time”: exploring everyday positioning practices to inform design’, Proceedings of the Third Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Tampere, Finland, pp.33–42. Wu, M.Y. (2004) ‘Wi-Fi community area networks enable a connected community’, IEEE 6th CAS Symp. on Emerging Technologies: Mobile and Wireless Commm., Shanghai, China, 31 May–2 June. Xiong, L. and Liu, L. (2003) ‘A reputation-based trust model for peer-to-peer ecommerce communities’, Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, pp.228–229. Xoetrope Website (2006) http://www.xoetrope.com/ (accessed 1 March 2006).