Electron Commer Res (2010) 10: 43–81
DOI 10.1007/s10660-010-9045-1
Electronic community factories: the model
and its application in the tourism sector
Demosthenes Akoumianakis
Published online: 1 April 2010
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
Abstract The electronic community factory (ECF) is proposed as an archetype for
value creating cross-organization virtual communities of practice in which members
engage actively and through domain-specific tools in the practice the community is
about. In an ECF the reason for building the community is to appropriate the benefits of virtual networking for developing new products of added-value and collective
ownership. In terms of engineering an ECF, the normative perspective adopted is that
community management is distinctively different from engaging in the practice the
community is about. Respectively, the tools needed for each function should embody
this philosophy and be designed accordingly. The paper elaborates on the concept
of the ECF and demonstrates its value through a pilot in regional tourism. Virtual
ethnographic studies provide insights to operational aspects of the ECF and how it
fosters community and practice management. Collectively, the results reported in the
paper constitute an alternative model for community-based electronic commerce suitable for value-creating cross organization virtual communities of practice engaging
in high quality product assembly in information based industries.
Keywords Electronic community factories · Community management · Practice
toolkits · Virtual ethnography
1 Introduction
Virtual communities of practice are technologically mediated structures which allow
virtual teams to undertake a broad range of collaborative practices when engaged in
D. Akoumianakis ()
Department of Applied Information Technology & Multimedia, Faculty of Applied Technologies,
Technological Education Institution of Crete, Estavromenos, 71500 Heraklion, Crete, Greece
e-mail: [email protected]
url: http://users.epp.teiher.gr/staff/da
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knowledge-based work. The results of such practices are typically codified as ‘collective’ artifacts and may range from simple messages and documents to complex design
concepts, reusable code segments and virtual prototypes of new products. Over the
past few years, the literature reporting empirical findings and experiences with virtual
communities of practice has grown exponentially indicating the promising applications, value and benefits offered by this new virtuality. Nevertheless, the vast majority
of recent work is devoted to community management (i.e., discovering, building and
maintaining communities), dismissing or undermining community practices and how
they are technologically mediated (i.e., the practice-specific elements, tools and artifacts involved).
In the present research, we are concerned with a type of value creating crossorganization virtual communities of practice in which members engage actively and
through domain-specific tools in the practice the community is about. Our exemplar practice domain is collaborative information-based product development which
entails defining, negotiating and finally assembling information-based products of
added value. These are non-material (intangible) products or services, such as vacation packages, which cannot be experienced by customers beforehand. As a result,
the customers’ purchasing behavior is catalyzed by available information, knowledge and experience. Their construction is characterized by assembling assets (such
as accommodation, transportation and reservation services) of different members of
a virtual alliance (cross-organization virtual community of practice) using practicespecific tools so as to devise an information-based product that cannot be produced
effectively and efficiently by any single member of the alliance.
We refer to this model of cooperation as the electronic community factory (ECF)
to highlight its dual focus on managing virtual communities of practice and enacting
software engineering processes and practices for information-based product assembly. The ECF stands on two pillars, namely cross-organization community management and practice-specific toolkits as media for codifying, transmitting and enacting collaborative practices in community settings. Elements of both are fused into
a computer-based platform which constitutes the technological setup of the ECF
for managing distributed collective practices [57] and enacting software engineering
processes. This paper aims to provide a functional account of the ECF and demonstrate its application in a domain of practice. The approach followed is rooted in the
design science paradigm for information systems research [32, 40]. We will briefly
justify this orientation by explicating the ECF in terms of the six requirements of
design science research in the information systems discipline:
(1) Identification and clear description of a relevant organizational IT problem.
The present research aims to foster cross-organization virtual communities of practice whose members engage in the practice of information-based product assembly.
The relevant challenges involved are not only related to what constitutes practice in
virtual space, but also how online practice is designed to exhibit locality and boundary features so as to become codified, internalized, transmitted and enacted by crossorganization virtual communities of practice.
(2) Adequacy of existing solutions. Recent research on systems supporting virtual
communities of practice focuses almost exclusively on faming online practice solely
in social interactions supported by a variety of community support systems and tools
Electronic community factories: the model and its application
45
(i.e., Blogs and RSS, Wikis, MOOs, etc.). Nevertheless, this orientation dismisses
elements of practice framed in processes, artifacts and tools which frequently undermine and determine engagement in cross-organization collaborative practice. On
the other hand, introducing a new virtual practice and devising a suitable information infrastructure for distributed collective practicing is known to be difficult and
challenging [57].
(3) Design novelty. To alleviate these problems, the ECF proposes to bridge across
two distinct and inseparable constituents, namely community management and practice management. This is achieved by advancing a general model and an architectural abstraction integrating community-support functions with practice-oriented
activities. Community support is grounded on augmenting capabilities of an open
source enterprise portal (i.e., Liferay). Practice-oriented activities are embedded in
a practice-oriented toolkit which takes the form of a ‘social’ software factory for
enacting software engineering processes and facilitating group decision support.
(4) Rigorous evaluation and assessment of its utility. Validity of the ECF is assessed by means of a case study illustrating collaborative assembly of vacation packages by virtual communities of practice in a regional tourism industry. Virtual ethnography and focus workshops were used to evaluate usability and utility of the pilot,
resulting in an improved understanding of how virtual communities of practice operationalize goals and engage in the designated practice as well as the social dynamics
which undermine cross-organization collaboration in virtual space.
(5) Articulation of value added to the IT knowledge-base and to practice. The
results provide sufficient evidence to justify the need for a new category of tool intended to foster and facilitate cross-organization collaboration in virtual settings as a
new practice rather than as reproduction of existing practices. In this context, the ECF
offers new insights to designing, transmitting and executing online practices by virtual communities of practice, while it makes several contributions to understanding
and supporting engagement of members in the practice the community is about.
(6) Explanation of the implications for IT management and practice. The ECF
implicates theoretical, engineering and practical advancements related to conduct of
collaborative work in virtual communities of practice. The theoretical contribution
amounts to framing online practice as much into the processes, artifacts and tools
used for knowledge sharing and management as in the social interactions taking place
in a virtual community of practice. In turn, this orientation motivates the engineering contribution of the ECF which is grounded on bridging community management
functions with a factory setup exploiting domain-specific and practice-oriented vocabularies for encapsulating meaning and making sense of online collaborative activity. The resulting general model and architecture extends prevailing conceptions
which concentrate almost exclusively on community management, neglecting or offering limited insight to the issue of engaging in the practice the community is about.
Finally, the ECF as deployed in the tourism sector to facilitate vacation package
assembly demonstrates both practical benefits resulting from virtual networking as
well as impediments resulting from prevailing conceptions, organizational culture
and other non-technological factors.
The paper is structured as follows. The next section briefly elaborates on practices
in collaborative settings and recapitulates upon communities of practice and software
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factories, the two themes driving the present work. Then, we present the methodology
followed to assess existing practices and envision new online practices in a service industry such as tourism. Our specific case study addresses information-based products
such as vacation packages. Subsequent sections elaborate on the general archetype of
the ECF in terms of major functional components and its deployment in the tourism
sector in the context of a recent R&D project. Finally, we present a virtual ethnography of the ECF pilot application, discuss recent evaluation results and conclude with
a summary of the main contributions of the present work.
2 Theoretical motivation and research focus
2.1 Related work
The present work links with prevalent theoretical conceptions of communities of
practice as tools for knowledge management, as opposed to learning, as well as recent engineering approaches to establishing practice-oriented social technologies for
collaborative work. In terms of communities of practice, our reference ground is to
be found in the later works by Wenger and Snyder [61] and Wenger et al. [62] where
the focus shifts from learning to knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer. As for
practice-oriented technologies we are interested in computer-mediated tools and environments which either encapsulate elements of a practice domain or establish new
practices. Since our reference domain is broadly relevant to enacting software engineering processes for assembling information-based products, software factories [30]
and social decision-support systems [58] provide critical technologies.
In order to set the focus of our current research, we will first provide a contextual
account of practice and the elements it may consist of. Following this, we review
relevant works on communities of practice and engineering perspectives on building
practice-oriented technologies in order to advance the proposition of the ECF as a
technology for practice in community settings.
2.1.1 Practice elements and types
Practice is not easy to define formally as there is no unified theory of practice
(see [51]). Nevertheless, there is a diverse and growing literature that has taken practice seriously from theoretical and philosophical standpoints [36, 38, 46]. Particularly
useful with regard to the aims of the present work is the view on practice advanced
by activity theory scholars.
Specifically, the activity theoretic view considers practice as subsuming activity [23]. Jarzabkowski in a series of published works [34–36] makes a distinction
between activity and practice defining activity as constituted by the actions of and interactions between actors as they perform their daily duties and roles, while practice
is used to refer to activity patterns across actors, which provides order and meaning
to a set of otherwise banal activities. In a similar vein, Schmidt et al. [52] asserts that
practice is performative in the sense that it is accomplished by skilled actors who rely
on both codified knowledge and experience to understand and assess how practices
Electronic community factories: the model and its application
47
can be applied, altered or tailored in order to attain specific goals. In turn, the performative nature of practice affords variation in its enactment which may be attributed
to institutional or technological factors.
Practice may be manifested either as on-line or off-line praxis, with the two frequently being intertwined. On-line practices represent the information commons prevailing in networks of practice [11, 22], especially when the members are not colocated, thus not interacting directly with one another. Through practices, disclosed
in some form or language and transmitted online, people are revealed as social peers.
Consequently, practices are learnt from others and, although individually administered, this learning occurs through an ongoing sensitivity to what other practitioners are doing [7, p. 26]. This leads to the conclusion that practices in collaborative
settings should not only express an artifacts’ relational possibilities, but also act as
mediators between potentially different views of the artifact.
For the purposes of the present work we adopt the perspective that practice represents the collective wisdom (habits, rules of thumb and socially-defined modes of
acting) through which a virtual community articulates common ground. Moreover,
we are concerned with practices exhibiting two features, namely ‘locality’ (i.e., being meaningful in the micro-practice domain of individual members) and ‘boundary’
(i.e., being recognizable across different social contexts and micro-practice domains).
We also distinguish between two types of practices, namely those framed in the social
interactions of a group of collaborators and those encapsulated in the processes, tools
and artifacts used by collaborators to attain a goal. Framing practice in this manner
allows us to explore a variety of novel issues related to the design of practice-oriented
toolkits for cross-organization virtual communities of practice.
2.1.2 Value-creating cross organization virtual communities of practice
The concept of a community of practice appeared in the literature in 1991 in the
works of Lave and Wenger [38] and Brown and Duguid [10]. This paper builds on
both these seminal works. Specifically, of particular interest is Brown and Duguid’s
concentration on how informal groups form to generate solutions to novel problems
through improvisation. At first glance this can be contrasted with Lave and Wenger’s
early emphasis on reproducing existing knowledge. Nevertheless, in Wenger’s subsequent works (i.e., [61]) especially those with McDermott [62] the focus shifts from
learning to knowledge management in groups composed of members drawn from
across functional boundaries to enhance organizational performance.
Since the introduction of the term in the literature, many authors have presented
theoretical and empirical works on how communities of practice (or variations of
the basic concept) can be deployed in different application domains and institutional
settings, including open source software projects [49, 50], new product development [28], service industries such as tourism [15, 55], the automobile and airspace
industries [53, 62], national agents and authorities [43], large companies such as
Siemens [24, 39] and Achmea—one of the largest insurance groups in Holland [20].
The scope of these studies is such that it does not facilitate direct comparisons of
results or the consolidation of a widely acceptable code of practice. Moreover, the
term ‘community of practice’ is not used consistently by authors. Frequently, it is
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used to refer to ‘virtual or online communities’ [18], ‘best-practice’ and ‘business
opportunity’ value-creating networks [12] or alternative organizational models for
customer relationship management [14, 42]. Similarly, the range of issues addressed,
do not always concentrate on knowledge management but on the conditions required
to maintain critical mass of content and participation, reciprocity, trust, commitment
and sustainability [6, 47].
In this paper we are concerned with value-creating cross-organization virtual communities of practice. These are communities whose members are faced with the dual
challenge of having to obey to the instituted ‘local’ practices using tools specific to
their business domain, as well as to internalize and perform the ‘boundary’ and ‘collaborative’ practices established and followed by the virtual community of practice.
A more informative account of value-creating cross organization virtual communities
of practice can be obtained by relating them to the prevailing notion of a community
of practice as knowledge management tool and extracting key differences in three
dimensions, namely nature of community (i.e., informal versus value-creating social
networks), community focus (i.e., community management versus practicing) and
community scope (i.e., single versus cross organization communities of practice).
Firstly, one characteristic of virtual communities of practice which stands out very
promptly in the majority of existing works is their informal nature, which frequently
makes the task of managing the community an ‘unmanageable’ endeavor. Recent
research seems to recognize this as a shortcoming and propose concepts such as
‘best-practice’ and ‘business opportunity’ value-creating networks [12]. Advocates
of this perspective claim that such value creating knowledge networks extend beyond
the traditional concept of communities of practice, as they directly contribute to the
creation of value within firms [24] and sustain community-based innovation [29].
Secondly, the majority of the works are devoted to community management (i.e.,
discovering, building and maintaining community), dismissing or under servicing
the elements of practice [57]. The few studies available concentrating explicitly on
‘practice-related’ aspects present different approaches towards capturing, codifying,
encoding experiences and exercising practices. For instance Franke and Piller [28]
describe the use of virtual prototypes to facilitate end users’ knowledge transfer towards improved design. Fuller et al. [29] assess the effectiveness of virtual design
contests allowing creative end user communities to influence future product designs.
Scacchi [49] concentrates on the use of threaded discussions and reusable code for
free and open source software development. These examples indicate that diverse
practice domains, such as consumer goods, automotive engineering and software design, obey to distinct rules of engagement and demand different tools (in terms of
type, scope and range) for practicing.
Thirdly, another issue worth noticing is that existing studies on communities of
practice analyze community management in single organizations, either public or
private [37]. The more demanding problem of community formation across organizational boundaries—either through inter-organizational partnerships or external
communities of practices—is seldom addressed [19].
In light of the above, cross organization virtual communities of practice can be
broadly defined as value-creating social networks formed by cross-sector representatives (inter-organizational communities) and empowered by a community support
Electronic community factories: the model and its application
49
system and dedicated tools for engaging in the practice the community is about. This
concept exhibits several of the characteristics associated with the established connotation of a community of practice as a tool for knowledge management. Specifically,
they are devised to sustain ‘dense relations of mutuality’ [60, p. 74], bring about a negotiated, joint enterprise ‘defined by the participants in the very process’ (p. 77) and
a shared repertoire including ‘routines, words, tools, ways of doing things, stories,
gestures, symbols, genres, actions, or concepts. . . ’ (p. 83). On the other hand, it does
have some distinct properties, with two standing out very promptly. The first relates
to the commitment to facilitating practices embodied into shared workflows, tools
and artifacts, thereby extending the prevailing conception which frames practice into
interpersonal interaction between members of a community of practice. The second
distinct feature is related to what constitutes value creation. Our understanding is that
value is created by fostering a dynamic environment in which community-based innovation may flourish, either as a result of analyzing end users’ purchasing behavior
and creative contributions or as proactive envisioning on behalf of the virtual community of practice. In turn, this influences and determines the practice-specific tools
needed to facilitate the required processes.
2.1.3 Practice-oriented technologies and toolkits
Practice-oriented technologies are defined as the means (or toolkits) through which
elements of a practice domain are encoded and manifested to facilitate what Wegner
refers to as mutual engagement, joint enterprise and a shared repertoire in a community of practice [60]. Such technologies may include generic tools and practicespecific and customized components. In the first category, typical examples include
information sharing (i.e., electronic mailing lists, listservs, Wikis, Blogs and RSS,
MOOs), tools for memory management [1], collaboratories [45], and tools for idea
exploration [26] and social construction of knowledge [25]. Typically, these tools
are general-purpose and decoupled from practice-specific properties. Moreover, they
tend to frame practice almost entirely to the social interaction between the collaborators. The second category, namely practice-specific tools, assumes that elements of
‘practice’ are embodied into shared processes, tools and artifacts, rather than mere
information sharing and social exchanges. Consequently, interpersonal interaction in
the form of sharing documents, expressing opinion and exchanging feedback, among
the members is necessary but not sufficient. Feed-through becomes equally important
(if not more critical) and amounts to shared responsibility and exercising influence
on the work of peers.
In the present work, practice-specific tools are conceived as the virtual ‘place’ for
engaging in the practice the community is about. They should be designed as tools
for creating new—rather than reproducing existing—knowledge and virtual assets.
Consequently, the challenge for these tools is not the integration of separate information systems, using some sort of interoperability mechanism (i.e., an ontology),
but the provision of shared vocabularies for collaborative engagement in designated
‘boundary’ practices. Since in cross-organization virtual communities of practice,
boundary and local practices are intertwined (i.e., the members’ collaborative behavior and praxis is influenced by local arrangements and vice versa), boundary practices
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become complex and cognitively demanding. Designing practice-oriented toolkits to
interactively manifest, transmit and enact a suitable subset of these practices can reduce the practitioners’ cognitive load and complexity As our interest in this paper
is to facilitate new information-based product development two critical technologies
are software factories and social decision support systems.
Software factories are discussed in the literature for several years with the focus
being placed either on the factory support environment (i.e., the computerized components) or its institutional character [17, 27, 33]. More recent works concentrate on two
prominent connotations emphasizing software assembly [30] and software process
improvement [8]. Software assembly advocates the notion of building software from
components by establishing patterns, frameworks and models and integrating them
into software schemas and domain-specific design languages. A software factory of
this type might include design patterns, reusable code, solution templates, wizards
and design guidance that make it easier to start a new application. In this view, the
basic premise of the software factory is that architects customize the various code
recipes of the factory and then redeploy them to development teams. This gives architects a practical mechanism for distributing their own guidance to developers. On
the other hand, Basili introduced the notion of the experience factory as a pathway
towards software process improvement relying heavily upon reuse and deployment
of previous codified experiences [8]. In the original formulation of the concept, Basili
did not prescribe a particular role for technology or the type of tools needed to support
the operation of an experience factory. However, in subsequent publications several
examples of codified and packaged experiences have been described as well as the
ingredients of the underlying technological set-up [9, 54].
Irrespective of the focus of the factory setup—either product assembly lines or
process improvement—a special category of tools of particular relevance to this work
is group or social decision support systems [58]. These are information management
tools supporting the expression, integration, and synthesis of diverse views in a manner in which: (a) participants can come to respect and understand the differences
caused by diverse values and interests of the contributors, and (b) there can be a
movement towards consensus on some of the issues involved. Group decision support systems draw upon a rich theoretical base to facilitate decision making in illstructured domains. A popular approach was originated by Rittel in the Issue-Based
Information System (IBIS) framework for argumentation [48]. Techniques and tools
aiming to implement decision-support systems using the IBIS framework provide
mechanisms for codifying issues, options, contributions as well as comments and relationships between these elements [13]. A recent trend seeks to develop informative
visualizations to capture both structure and content of the underlying decision space
[1, 16, 21, 44] so as to augment human decision making. This is not always easy as
decision making processes may be messy, unstructured, and unsuited to support by
conventional management information systems [31, 59].
2.2 Research questions and focus
In light of the above, the present work attempts to integrate fabrics of communities of practice with factory-based assembly of information-based services and social
Electronic community factories: the model and its application
51
decision support systems in an effort to support the operation of value creating crossorganization virtual communities of practice. Consequently, the relevant top-level research questions include:
• What type of activities constitute ‘practice’ in cross-organization virtual communities of practice?
• How is such practice encoded, transmitted and enacted through computer-mediated
environments of practice?
• To what extent can computer-mediated environments foster and enable change
(in virtual practices) rather than merely reconstruct existing well-established practices?
In this endeavor, our aim is not to advance the theoretical thinking behind virtual
communities of practice so much as to contribute to the debate regarding the engineering ground and the type of tools needed to facilitate the members’ engagement
in the practice the community is about. To this end, the paper advances a proposal
for the ECF aiming to describe a general model fostering cross-organization virtual
communities of practice in information-based industries with emphasis on engaging in the practice the community is about. This is particularly timely and appropriate as the vast majority of studies concentrate on community management and
community-support systems. The novelty of the ECF is that it bridges across two
distinct functions, namely community management and practice management. This
is facilitated by developing practice-oriented environments to establish the required
software factory setup and to provide the virtual ‘place’ for engaging in the practice
the community is about.
3 Methodology and research approach
3.1 Context of the work
In the context of recent research we have been examining the challenges introduced
above and experimenting with a variety of practice-oriented toolkits in application
domains such as collaborative learning in music master classes [4] and vacation package assembly [5]. Our work in these areas explores two alternative methodological
pathways to designing practice-oriented toolkits. The first is grounded on the observation that certain practices are so well-defined and widely established that the
toolkit can only encapsulate elements of these practices and facilitate their computermediated reproduction. The second option is to design the toolkit so as to reflect a
new practice. The former, which is representative of our music master class example,
promotes the view that the toolkit alters the way in which the practice is enacted,
processed, transmitted and socially manifested, but it does not radically change the
essence of the practice. The second alternative, representing the case of assembling
vacation packages, postulates the design of the toolkit as new practice for attaining
goals not previously viable. The new practice amounts to harmonizing (potentially
different and incompatible) institutionalized ‘local’ practices adopted by members of
the cross-organization virtual community of practice.
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To justify this and to further qualify the distinction between toolkits as encapsulated practice and toolkits as enablers for new practice, we will briefly elaborate on a
case study aimed to provide insights to what is considered to be new practice in the
present context and how it may influence the design of a practice-specific toolkit. Our
reference domain is the tourism sector and the construction of vacation packages.
3.2 Case study: vacation package development practices
To address the above questions, a variety of research methods were used to collect
data and envision new capabilities for improved practices for building vacation packages. Specifically, a non-experimental descriptive survey was conducted utilizing interviews, on-site visits and scenarios. As our intention was to unfold hidden or implicit elements of community practice, interviews and on-site visits were tailored so
as to feed envisioning of new (improved) practices. In turn, these were contextualized using scenarios of use and rapid prototyping techniques. The scenarios of use
included detailed description of the actions taken for a task to be performed by all
actors involved in building vacation packages. Virtual prototypes, cognitive walkthroughs and interviewing of tour operators and travel agencies provided further additional insight.
3.2.1 Established practices
Our survey revealed 7 standard practices involved in the development of vacation
packages. Some of them are enacted individually (i.e., they are performed by one actor alone) such as “Define Package Abstract Details” or “Define Package Services”
and some are social (i.e., they are performed by a group of collaborators) such as
“Discuss Service Details” or “Package Service Finalization”. Depending on the nature of the vacation package the enactment of a designated practice may vary in terms
of effort and scope. For instance, “Package Dissemination & Promotion” implicates
different set of activities for overseas packages requiring travel documents than inland
traveling where the promotion is performed exclusively by the tour operator. Consequently, the community actors involved may vary accordingly. In terms of practiceoriented technologies, our survey revealed that there are practices which are manifested as offline local activities performed using traditional tools and artifacts (i.e.,
notebook, drawing board) and social practices enabled by a blend of conventional
communication media such as telephone, fax, e-mail, as well as more advanced tools
and collaboration technologies such as portals, bulletin boards, web pages, legacy
software such as reservation systems (CRS) and costumer relationship management
(CRM) systems.
Summarizing our analysis of the current situation leads to the following conclusions. First of all, vacation packages undergo distinct stages from conception to
population and marketing, with a fair amount of iteration. In each stage there are
specific issues to be addressed with clear milestones and outcomes. Ownership is
solely with the creator of the package, not the contributing partners. Thus the contributor’s liability amounts to executing part of the plan as delegated to him/her by
the owner. Communities exist to facilitate customer-relationship management and
Electronic community factories: the model and its application
53
less frequently inter-organizational alliances. In the later case, community formation
is largely opportunistic, based on personal contacts and making use of traditional
community support media. Community membership does raise implications on local
practices, but only marginal. Interaction between community members, if existent,
is on a need-driven basis and purely informative (i.e., one member informs another
about an event). Entering or opting out from a community is dissertational and seldom follows specific rules. Consequently sense of community is weak and it can, by
no means, be considered a catalyst for new or differentiated vacation packages.
3.2.2 Synthesizing an online practice for assembling vacation packages
In an effort to gain insight to potential improvements, we have also presented the
experts with a tentative scenario of a cross-organization community of practice specializing on vacation package assembly and analyzed their response and feedback.
Our intention was to concentrate on a particular type of vacation packages which are
not widely supported at present. These are packages tightly linked to a geographic
region and independent of the pre-packaged solutions available to customers through
modern destination management systems. Typically, these packages have short durations (i.e., a few days) and high added value resulting from their locality. They are
made up from primitive components such as transportation to and from a designated
site, food & beverage, entrance fees, local accommodation (if needed), all blended
into one transaction. Such primitive services should be tailorable so as to reflect special requirements and optional offerings. Packages of this sort may be considered
either as peripheral supplements of a pre-packaged vacation or as factors stimulating
the ultimate choice of destination and /or pre-packaged solution. They are created by
responding to informal customer requests, circumstantial incidents or foreseen events
taking place within a designated geographic region. These characteristics necessitate
that such vacation packages must be innovative ‘collective’ offerings, quickly compiled (if possible by reusing assets) and adaptable so as to suit different needs and requirements of the customer base. The qualification ‘collective’ is used to convey that
no single business actor can provide the vacation package effectively and efficiently
by account of own resources. It can then be argued that creating such packages is a
knowledge management task of a dedicated community of practice.
It turns out that the envisioned scenario sets the context of a new practice for
building vacation packages of a particular type and scope. This new fully computermediated institution of practices results from transforming/expanding existing practices and establishing new elements as needed. For instance, the practice “Find appropriate partners” is expanded and subsumes on-line practices such as “Invite appropriate partners” and “Formation of community of practice”. In the existing status
quo there are previous agreements between the tour operator and service suppliers
and thus there is no need for invitations. Instead, tour operators typically choose
from a list according to the needs of the package. Another example is “Discuss activity details” which subsumes “Issue detection”, “Issue resolution proposal” and
“Solution selection”. At present, when tour operators face a problem they resolve
it by formal or informal communication (i.e., telephone, fax or email). However, in a
computer-mediated environment an issue is raised and addressed through dedicated
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tools such asynchronous forums and bulletin boards, issue management systems,
argumentation-based tools, online discussion visualizations, etc.
Synthesizing a new practice out of the pool of empirical evidence entails decisions on two primary constituents, namely the package development workflows and
community management. In terms of package development workflows four distinct
stages have been identified representing intertwining activities in the development of
a vacation package. These are initiation, elaboration, deployment and tailoring, each
hosting separate institutions of practice. Specifically, the definition of the package,
its duration and the required activities are designated in the initiation phase. Package elaboration entails commitment of resources on behalf of the partners for the
activities each can support. This may involve discussion and reflection upon tentative
proposals as well as negotiation of details of one or more activities. The deployment
stage gathers all contributions and packages them into a concrete offering which can
be disseminated. Finally the tailoring stage is concentrated on the package retail allowing prospective customers to request changes and modifications so as to suit own
requirements and preferences.
The second constituent relates to the community management. For our purposes,
the community of practice is conceived of as a mission-specific electronic squad.
The mission is the development of the vacation package so as to meet designated
constraints. The electronic squad is the cross-organization community of practice involved in the vacation package development workflows. In this context, three distinct
roles are identified, namely the squad moderator, the squad member and the customer.
A typical squad established in the traditional practice environment comprises the tour
operator, the travel agent, the service providers and the end-customer. In contrast, an
electronic squad is made up from one moderator, several members representing the
inter-organizational alliance and the customer (or villager expressing the demand for
the squad’s mission). In terms of squad lifecycles, our survey informally confirmed
existing sociological accounts rooted in dynamic group stabilization theories [56]
indicating four basic lifecycle stages, namely forming, storming, norming and performing.
In light of the above, it is now possible to synthesize the vacation package assembly practice as follows. Vacation packages are the collective artifact of an electronic
squad. The squad’s moderator designates new packages by selecting a corresponding package family to be populated by the squad. The squad is formed once the abstract package is defined. Squad re-formation continues throughout the package initiation and elaboration workflows allowing candidates to assess package requirements
against own resources and accordingly declare commitment or withdrawal from the
package. At the end of the elaboration phase the squad is stabilized and not likely to
change until the end of the package lifecycle. The storming stage starts when initial
activities are defined and the squad has taken its principal form. Storming is about
reaching consensus on the specific mission and subsuming activities. The stage ends
once all relevant issues have been addressed. Devising a common agenda with respect to the issues raised is the objective of the norming stage which is in partial
overlap with the package elaboration workflow, lasting until the end of the deployment workflow. Finally, the performing stage is in full temporal overlap with the
package tailoring workflow.
Electronic community factories: the model and its application
55
4 ECF framework and architecture
In the previous section we described briefly the methodology followed to gain insight
to vacation package assembly, from two distinct perspectives, namely community
management and practice-oriented workflows. We will now aim to bring together the
concepts elaborated so far and briefly describe an architectural model of the ECF
which integrates community management and practice-oriented workflows. In this
effort, our intention is to provide a functional rather than a technical account of the
ECF.
At the highest conceptual level, the ECF pursues the idea that community management is distinctively different from engaging in the practice the community is about.
Respectively, the tools needed for each function should be designed accordingly. Figure 1 depicts the proposed functional organization. Community management is responsible for building/hosting the community and involves definition of community
roles, setting rules for engagement and participation, electronic member registration,
provisions for declaring virtual assets and information sharing. The practice-oriented
functions are undertaken by moderated electronic squads (i.e., communities of practice) using dedicated tools. These functions are spread across two constituent roles,
namely moderators and squad members, represented by the circular components in
Fig. 1. The assembly line and the squad members’ toolkit constitute the only means
through which squads are formed, managed and engage in the practice they are about.
It is worth noticing that the two suits of tools interoperate using a common infor-
Fig. 1 Architectural model of an electronic community factory
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D. Akoumianakis
mation space comprising plug-ins, shared data models and software components and
tools whose primary function is to encapsulate elements of a designated practice (i.e.,
social interaction using a shared message board, members’ negotiation and metanegotiation on shared artifacts, etc.). In subsequent sections we will provide further
details on both these software suits.
4.1 Community management
Community management in the ECF is about building and maintaining sense of community between different target users such as customers, business partners and collaborators engaged in a joint enterprise, with each type being served and facilitated
by different tools. Firstly, end user communities are formed between all kinds of
customers interested in the offerings of the ECF. The primary function of end user
communities is to engage in social exchanges regarding the ECF’s product offerings. Secondly, electronic neighborhoods are online communities comprising business partners offering particular services of a specified thematic scope. For instance
a department’s learning community may be formed with three neighborhoods representing, for example, academic stuff, students and the department’s secretariat.
Finally, electronic squads constitute the cross-organization virtual communities of
practice dynamically formed to engage in the practice of information-based product
assembly. We will attempt to further characterize the latter two types of community,
as these constitute the cornerstones in the ECF’s operation.
Electronic neighborhoods aggregate services of a particular type and support specific goals depending on the needs of the members or the expectations of the wider
market/economic environment. Goals are pursued by members providing contributions governed by policies and rules of engagement. Policies are embedded into
processes covering registration and access, acceptance of new members, rules of acceptable behavior, security, privacy, freedom of speech/act and moderation. Such
policies are interactively manifested by an electronic neighborhood registration system responsible for assigning roles and determining access to the neighborhood
services. Each neighborhood may provide general-purpose communication services
such as notification (SMS, GroupSMS, IM, forums), as well as neighborhood-specific
information services (i.e., neighborhood news, on-line directory and neighborhood
information templates).
Electronic squads are conceived of as cross-neighborhood, mission-specific virtual
communities of practice. Their mission amounts to the development of a new product within the scope of the ECF so as to meet designated constraints. An electronic
squad of this type comprises one moderator and several squad members from different neighborhoods. Throughout the virtual life of an electronic squad, squad members
operate in a dual mode. On the one hand, members continue to undertake ordinary
business as if the community did not exist, while concurrently they are entitled to
engage in the distributed collective practice of the virtual community of practice. In
effect, this dual mode of operation entails a degree of intertwining between ‘local’
and ‘boundary’ practices. Local practices refer to institutionalized practices followed
by individual members in their daily operation as autonomous business entities. On
the other hand ‘boundary’ practices are plastic enough to make sense locally, given
Electronic community factories: the model and its application
57
the constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a
common identity across different social contexts. In terms of squad lifecycles, Tuckman’s theory on social dynamics in small group activities [56] provides the ground
for designing the tools for managing electronic squads. This is further detailed in the
following section which is devoted to the ECF’s deployment for vacation package
assembly.
In summary, the ECF fosters a staged community management model which facilitates virtual communities of interest, business-oriented online communities (or electronic neighborhoods) and cross-organization virtual communities of practice (i.e.,
electronic squads). Each type of community is intended to facilitate different purpose
and distinct targets. Respectively, registration, virtual presence, content management,
access to information and communication services and use of dedicated tools represent virtual assets assigned on the grounds of roles undertaken in each type of virtual
community.
4.2 Factory set-up
The factory set-up constitutes the operational environment of electronic squads and
serves as the technological infrastructure encapsulating the functions of a designated
practice domain (upper part in Fig. 1). It is intended to integrate the tools needed
to specify, define and assemble domain-specific information products and services
within the ECF’s scope. These tools provide the only means through which electronic
squads engage in the practice they are intended to enact. In the ECF, the factory is
conceived as a collaborative software platform (or practice toolkit) available only to
members of electronic squads (i.e., neighbors and moderators) for contributing to the
mission of a squad. As squads comprise two functional roles, namely the moderator
and the member, the practice toolkit should preserve this distinction in the functions
and services supported. Consequently, the toolkit comes in two versions—one for
moderators and one for business partners of an electronic squad—represented by the
circular components in Fig. 1. The assembly line is the primary function of the moderator and supports a variety of tasks such as managing the collaborative workflows,
requesting input from and guiding squad members, packaging and publishing the collective outcome of an electronic squad as well as monitoring operational details of
a vacation package. On the other hand, the squad members’ toolkit is the medium
through which members of the squad engage in the practice of vacation package assembly by contributing their assets, responding to the moderator’s requests and negotiating properties of a vacation package. The assembly line and the squad members’
toolkit integrate components which allow (asynchronous and synchronous) access to
a common information space (see middle part in Fig. 1) which drives the process of
vacation package assembly.
There are four essential components which are required to create an operational
instance of a factory, namely (a) a definition of the artifacts to be produced within
the scope of the factory, (b) workflows supporting the lifecycle of an artifact (c) a
visual design language to manipulate the artifacts and their components across workflows and (d) rendering mechanisms to assemble and build the artifacts. Collectively
these components constitute the factory’s common information space. The assembly
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D. Akoumianakis
line, which is a primary function of the moderator, supports the workflows defined
on a domain-specific product line specification (or product family) characterizing the
products assembled within the scope of the factory. A product family is considered
as a codified abstract representation which is progressively transformed to a concrete
offering (i.e., instance of the family) through the designated workflows. This transformation is materialized through the distributed collective practice of an electronic
squad commissioned to compile and support a specific product and whose members
contribute by responding to the moderator’s requests or by reflecting upon the shared
artifacts of work-in progress. It is also important to note that a product line specification can be used to assemble a variety of concrete products, while it can also be
reused, extended and modified as experience grows or as requirements evolve. All
defined product families or product line specifications designate the range of artifacts
produced within the scope of the factory.
In the ECF the product is assembled in its entirety from XML using different types
of tools facilitating collaboration, shared workflow management as well as automated
product assembly within the scope of a product family. These tools constitute components of the common information space and include general purpose collaboration
software (i.e., collaborative message boards, virtual meeting tools, synchronous communication, etc.) and practice-oriented tools (i.e., rendering engines, JSPs for packaging) supporting the designated distributed collective practice. Although a technical
description of these tools is beyond the scope of the present work, it is important
to note that the current implementation of the ECF provides the necessary support
for component reuse and customization. Specifically, recent work [3] has demonstrated the applicability of ECF’s tools for building information-based products in
application domains other than tourism (i.e., semester course plans, trade fairs and
conference program schedules).
5 Deployment of the ECF in tourism
The ECF as presented above constitutes an alternative model for community-based
electronic commerce and an architectural framework for value creating cross organization virtual communities of practice formed to foster high quality product
assembly in information based industries. Information-based industries are those
whose products are non-material (intangible)—thus, customers cannot experience
them beforehand—while knowledge catalyzes purchasing behavior and is central to
gaining competitive advantage. One such industry is tourism, which is progressively
transformed from a leading application in B2C e-commerce into an information business.
Detailed analysis of current practices in building vacation packages, as discussed
in Sect. 3, revealed a number of challenges which have motivated the deployment
of the ECF in this sector of the industry. Specifically, it turns out that web-based
online communities in tourism exist, but their main objective is to provide an alternative mechanism for customer-relationship management. Cross-sector communities
of practice, involving representatives of different business activities are non-existent.
Thus, collaboration is informal and using conventional means and custom practices
owned by different players.
Electronic community factories: the model and its application
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The above have motivated the deployment of the ECF in the tourism sector and
the development of an experimental setup implementing the functions and tools described in Fig. 1 so as to support and facilitate the new practice of vacation package
assembly. This was done in the context of the eKoNES research and development
project (see Acknowledgment) and is briefly reviewed in the following.
5.1 The portal for community management
In eKoNES, community management is facilitated by a dedicated community portal which hosts all community management functions. Our running prototype is an
augmented instance of the LifeRay (http://www.liferay.com) content management
system and application server. As this component was to serve the management of
cross-organization virtual communities of practice as well as interoperation with factory setup for vacation package assembly, a number of augmentations were introduced. Some of the prominent and demanding augmentations were designed to facilitate neighborhood management, electronic registration, asynchronous notification
(using SMS, GroupSMS and Instant Messaging) and development of dedicated and
customized portlets to facilitate interoperation with the practice toolkit as shown in
the lower part of Fig. 1. For the purposes of our example, we will briefly review only
the augmented portal components to provide an illustrative account of the eKoNES
communityware.
One type of augmentations introduced on top of the basic Liferay portal address the development of dedicated portlets for electronic neighborhood management
such as the customized neighborhood forum, the neighborhood search engine and
the neighborhood directory service. Figure 2 provides an instance of the eKoNESTourism portal (http://www.e-kones/village), with the currently selected neighborhood being ‘Culture’, while for the purposes of this discussion we have deleted the
content. As shown each neighborhood is organized as a collection of portlets including the neighborhood news portlet, neighborhood services portlet and neighborhood
directory portlet. It is worth noticing the custom portlet ‘Neighborhood news’ which
has a different (two-column) organization as opposed to the single column organization of the other portlets.
Electronic registration to a neighborhood allows eKoNES villagers (i.e., users registered to eKoNES through the standard Liferay registration mechanism) to incrementally obtain neighbor authorities, thus being able to declare competencies, describe
their service offerings, gain access to protected neighborhood services, take part in
decision-making and manipulate contents. Registration to a neighborhood is a twostep process (see Fig. 3). In the first step, the system allows the candidate to modify
details of an existing account or to develop a new account. In the second step, the
candidate should declare the neighborhoods of interest and the services supported.
Upon successful registration, neighbors are presented in the neighborhood’s directory and obtain access to downloadable software components and dedicated tools
which are needed for their effective participation in the collaborative exchanges of
eKoNES squads. As for content, we have designed a large gallery of custom information portlets which can be used to present neighborhood-specific information services
such as service descriptions, package previews, tips of the day, recommendations, the
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D. Akoumianakis
Fig. 2 Neighborhood organization
Fig. 3 Stages in electronic neighborhood registration
neighborhood’s mall, various ‘search and find’ services, etc. One of these portlets is
dedicated to hosting the factory’s feed- through in terms of available vacation packages (see portlet entitled ‘Available packages’).
Electronic community factories: the model and its application
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5.2 Components of the practice-specific toolkit
The practice-oriented toolkit provides the ‘mechanics’ of the factory set up and provides the virtual space for compiling and assembling vacation packages of different
types. In what follows, we briefly review the basic components of this toolkit emphasizing the supported functionality and how this is integrated in the factory setup.
5.2.1 The package family schema
A package is manipulated in the squad’s virtual work room. This is a virtuality which
offers a synchronization point for all members of a squad and a shared virtual space
for collaboration. The tools offered and the contents of a room are adapted depending
on the role of the entrant. This type of adaptation is recognized and initiated by the
system and covers both adaptation to local computing environment (i.e., language) as
well as adaptation of the content of the room and its interactive manifestation. Within
a room, squad members have access to active packages to which they have committed
resources, the room’s shared message board and the synchronous collaborative session management tool. On the other hand, moderators have access to additional tools
allowing them to carry out some of the practices involved in the package workflows.
The package family schema defines the scope of the artifacts produced within the
scope of the factory. Devising such a schema requires an analysis of both commonalities and variants that characterize instances of a package family. For example, a
common feature in all packages is the notion of an activity, which models an abstract
service component offered by a neighborhood. Then, a package can be considered as
an aggregation of activities taking place within a day. On the other hand, activities
differ in terms of type, duration, execution mode (i.e., sequence/parallel execution),
interdependencies (i.e., a transport activity assumes a transportation medium). New
package development can be accelerated and made more agile by designing a visual language specialized to model structural and spatial semantics of this domain of
interest. To this end, eKoNES exploits a set of advanced interaction platform administration mechanisms [2], namely toolkit augmentation, expansion and integration,
which allow for building metaphor-specific visual models of vacation packages. Subsequent sections provide examples of the application of these strategies in the context
of our pilot case.
5.2.2 Populating packages
Package construction takes place in distinct workflows each contributing to the transformation of an abstraction to a concrete instance within the scope of a designated
schema. Typically, a domain-specific vocabulary (i.e., a visual design language) allows manipulation of the package across the workflows. For vacation packages, such
workflows may include package initiation (i.e., selection within of family schema
and initialization); elaboration (i.e., designating neighborhood services such as transportation, accommodation, food and beverage, for each day of the package); deployment (i.e., defining parameters of the package such as pricing, content details such
as images and descriptions, required to publish the package as a collective resource
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Fig. 4 Workflows in the package-specific toolkit
through the portal, and tailoring (i.e., reflection on package from customers which
triggers re-execution of some workflows to tailor the package to the customers needs).
Figure 4 presents the relevant workflows and the main technologies involved in each
stage/workflow. As shown, the workflows progressively transform an abstract package to a concrete offering experienced through a specific devise. Accordingly, the
technologies used to implement the corresponding functions in the ECF follow a
similar trend—from abstract to specific.
A new package is always initiated by a moderator by designating the package family and the neighborhood-specific services required (i.e., accommodation, food and
beverage, transportation, etc.). An initial squad is formed on the grounds of matching
members’ declared offerings during electronic registration to neighborhoods) against
package required services. Populating a package family is undertaken only by mature
squads comprising members who have committed resources to the package. This intertwining between the vacation package development workflows and the squad life
cycle stages is summarized in Table 1.
Each workflow provides an alternative view to the package being developed with
suitable exploration-based graphical querying capabilities. Thus, in the forming stage
the moderator obtains a visual depiction of the current structure of the squad, indicating partners committed, withdrawn and pending. In the elaboration workflow the
package is presented as a schedule of activities with suitable visual details differentiating between different types of neighborhood services. For instance, the top screen
in Fig. 5 presents an instance of the moderator’s view of a vacation package in the
elaboration stage. The upper part of the screen presents the vacation package using an
‘expanded’ component (the ActivityPanel container). The tabbed pane in the bottom
dialog updates the corresponding view of the package. This facility is available only
to the moderator, not the members, of the squad.
Squad members can access the package through a different user interface (see
bottom screen in Fig. 5) available through the business partners’ client toolkit. This
Electronic community factories: the model and its application
63
Table 1 Practice development workflows versus squad lifecycle stages
component implements a different visual layout for the same domain model, while
it allows users to select activities owned, as well as to set the designated activity parameters. In this view, activities are laid out so as to indicate parallelism, sequence,
containment and overlap. Through the lower dialogue the user can modify/update
specific parameters of an owned activity, thus contributing to the package. Such contributions effectively amount to detailing parameters of an activity depending on the
partner’s local practices. In this process, the moderator or the squad members can
raise issues considered important for the package and subsequently engage in a dialogue to resolve them. Such social interactions constitute the storming phase in the
squad’s life cycle and may address a variety of issues such as discount policies, payment clearance as well as unforeseen events (i.e., local strikes) which may impact a
vacation package. Making proposals for these issues and reaching consensus on their
resolution is the norming stage in the squad’s lifecycle. Storming and norming are
transparent to the squad members. In fact, they only make sense for the moderator,
driving a range of decision-supporting interactions through suitable visualizations of
archived exchanges.
However, there are cases where the above asynchronous exchanges are not sufficient to resolve the issues raised. To this end, the eKoNES factory setup supports
synchronous collaboration between squad members, using a partially replicated architecture and allowing for context-specific rendering of a domain model (i.e., package). Squad moderators issue collaboration sessions during the elaboration phase either to resolve conflicts or negotiate parts of a package. Moderators also define the
object of collaboration, designating either the entire package or specific components
of the package. In a synchronous session, the eKoNES factory assembles the relevant
parts of the model and renders it according to the interactive metaphor assigned to the
elaboration stage. Replicas of this model are also rendered to all collaborating clients
registered in the session.
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Fig. 5 Package compilation by the moderator (top) and squad members (bottom)
D. Akoumianakis
Electronic community factories: the model and its application
65
Fig. 6 A replicated object as viewed by the moderator (left) and the squad members (right)
This is shown in Fig. 6 which details an instance of the same package rendered in
the moderator’s and the collaborating partners’ view respectively, as well as some of
the interaction patterns and their effect on the visual layouts of the registered partners.
It is worth noting the differences in the two views which however are fully synchronized. Access to the replicated object in a collaborative session is moderated by a
floor manager undertaking runtime permission assignment. Floor holders can request
specific information about an object by annotating it, posing questions or requesting
clarification. They can also introduce changes to the model which affects the work
of others (see Fig. 6). As shown, the holder of the floor (in the example the floor is
assumed to be with the moderator) can resize, move, update, create a clone of a component, with all such changes being propagated to all views registered in the session.
For purposes of illustration we have annotated the screens so as to depict both start
and end conditions, though red rectangles and yellow arrows respectively, for each
interaction object class. In all cases, the visual view of the modified object is updated
with ‘accept/reject’ buttons in the direction of the change. Finally, it is important to
mention that the two views although different are fully synchronized within the same
collaborative session so as to preserve consistency of the shared workspace.
5.2.3 Assembling and tailoring a package
Package assembly is the process of ‘packaging’ an artifact within the scope of a designated schema and presenting it as a resource through the community portal. This
process may be implemented as a rendering engine which assembles the components
of a package (from XML), undertakes the required transformations and streams the
packaged content into a dedicated portlet. At this stage, all potential customers (with
registered interest on the package), are informed via the eKoN ES notification services (i.e., email, SMS and Group SMS). As the package content is fully separated
from its presentation, the package can be manifested through alternative forms and
terminals using a context sensitive rendering mechanism, thus allowing alternative
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D. Akoumianakis
Fig. 7 The package in the deployment phase
interactive embodiments of the package. Figure 7 depicts the elaboration of a package in a portlet context. As shown the HTML file generated includes clear indication
of the tailoring that the user can undertake which results in different personalized
versions of the package.
6 Assessment of the eKoNES pilot and discussion
The ECF concept as deployed in eKoNES is now a fully operational pilot with various evaluation scenarios being undertaken to study structural and social aspects of
the electronic squads formed to facilitate vacation package assembly. To this end,
over a two-year period (2006–2008), we have built the essential relationships with
key actors in the field and gained their commitment to a comprehensive evaluation
methodology covering both formative assessments aiming to improve early prototypes as well as summative evaluations with expert end users and business partners.
Formative assessments of early prototypes was planned and executed using standard
techniques such as prototype walkthroughs, laboratory testing and analysis of break
downs in the execution of hypothetical scenarios. Despite the fact that the results of
these evaluations have been very positive it is strongly believed that the actual value
is to be found from observing operating squads over longer periods of time. This will
give sufficient data to answer critical questions about eKoNES which amount to understanding the knowledge management that takes place, the way such communities
Electronic community factories: the model and its application
67
are cultivated as well as behavioral patterns which emerge as a result of the members’ social interactions and/or the customers’ purchasing behavior and its impact on
individual and community levels.
To allow for such assessments we have devised a multilevel/multiphase evaluation
scheme which allows us to gain empirical insights to operating squads through virtual ethnographies with the researchers becoming active participants as squad moderators. This approach offers the opportunity to study a variety of basic questions
such as participation, service quality and use and sociability at different community
levels, as well as to put into perspective what social interactions are taking place.
Table 2 summarizes the above research issues and relates them to different community levels by means of quantifiable measures. Some of these measures can be
derived directly from the computer-mediated environment, while others require qualitative techniques, such focus groups, interviewing and administration of questionnaires.
As our interest extends to intra- and inter-squad dynamic behavior of members we
have also planned detailed assessments of squad-level performance across different
lifecycle stages. This has led to the identification of key issues per stage in the squad’s
lifecycle as summarized in Table 3. As in the case of Table 2, our intention is to identify quantifiable measures that can be related to persistent data collected by the ECF
in the course of its operation, while allowing the extraction of both quantitative and
qualitative evidence regarding the squad members’ behavior. The above constitute the
main research lines of our on-going evaluation agenda. Obviously, a full exposition of
all relevant issues in the current paper is not possible, as many assessments are still
on-going and expected to provide useful results in due time. Nevertheless, we can
provide details of virtual ethnographies of operating squads as well as the qualitative
findings of thematic workshops and focus groups with actors from the field.
6.1 Virtual ethnographies of operating squads
Virtual ethnography [41] is a technique used for understanding social life in an online setting. It entails a process of intermittent engagement, rather than long-term
immersion in a virtual space or environment. For our purposes, virtual ethnographies
were organized around specific vacation packages with the researchers becoming active participants as squad moderators. The objectives were to track and assess social
interactions between squad members while engaged in virtual assembly of a vacation package. In what follows, we provide indicative insights offered by the virtual
ethnography of the ‘Peloponissos round Trip’ discussed in previous sections. We will
concentrate on the moderator’s tasks (i.e., functionality of the assembly line in Fig. 1),
as these are more demanding and complex but also informative of the capabilities of
the ECF. For purposes of simplicity we will not preview the starting workflows of
defining an abstract package by designating package family and neighborhoods.
Running packages can be previewed as shown in Fig. 8 (top) which depicts graphically the social exchanges between squad members. The custom layout of the graph
allows interactive exploration of messages with indication of path. Thus, selecting
a leaf node will draw around it the messages of the corresponding tread in a temporal fashion (left to right). Entering a package’s room presents the moderator with
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D. Akoumianakis
Table 2 Evaluation issues and assessment
Participation
Services and use
Business
• Number and geographic
spread of
villagers—measured directly
from accounts created
• Cross-neighborhood
villagers
• Rationale for
registering—measured by
analyzing topic of requests
• Frequency of use—measured
as number of requests
posted, packages purchased
• Added value—measured as
the number of packages
purchased
• Percentage of transactions
made
• Percentage of posts to a
thread
• Percentage of positive posts
• Percentage of negative posts
• Percentage accepting a
package
• Percentage requesting further
refinements
• Percentage of users making
repeated purchases
• Percentage of users making
repeated posts without
purchasing
• Popular packages by
customer profile over a
period of time
• Tracking changes in
customers’ patterns
• Popular business partners by
category of package
• Popular business partner by
customer profile
• Popular services by category
of package
• Popular services by customer
profile
Neighborhood
• Number of active
neighborhoods
• Size of neighborhood
• Role and function of active
neighborhoods
• Popular versus less popular
neighborhoods
• Neighborhood tendencies
• How is sense of community
supported/facilitated in a
neighborhood
• Reason for participation in
an neighborhood
• Neighborhood service
appropriateness according to
thematic goal
• Member congregation per
service
• Preconditions for supporting
a service
• Service demanded over a
period of time
• Tracking changes in
customer demand
• Cross-neighborhood
members
• Do they exist and what are
they concerned with
• Members judgment upon
neighborhood’s purpose
• Who defines them and how
• Number of rules that regulate
members’ behavior in a
neighborhood
• Degree of rule adoption
• Percentage of action deemed
as improper behavior
• Subjective member’s
satisfaction from other
members
• Subjective benefit from
participating in a squad
• Satisfaction from the
collective effort
• Subjective opinion on set
rules
• Percentage of rule adoption
by members
• Percentage of action towards
behavioral rules violation
• Subjective member
satisfaction from the
moderator
Squad
• No. of different squads
created in a given period of
time
• % of squads completing their
mission without problems
• % of squads completing the
mission with problems and
type of problems
• Squad formation patterns
Sociability
the room’s tools and the moderator’s ‘to-do’ list for a specific package (bottom). The
‘to-do’ list is manifested as electronic post-it notes with tasks requiring immediate
attention being placed in the forefront. The dialogue on the upper right hand side of
the ‘to-do’ frame can be used to create/delete/modify and search for electronic post-it
notes.
Electronic community factories: the model and its application
69
Table 3 Squad-level quality factors and scope of improvement
Forming
Storming
Norming
Performing
• Percentage of
participants in a
squad with active
contribution—
assessed by content
analysis of posts in
the shared message
board
• Percentage of squad
members opting
out—measured from
‘withdrawal’ posts in
the message board
• Reasons for
members’
withdrawal—
extracted from
content analysis of
the corresponding
posts
• Members remaining
in the squad but not
actively contributing
• Percentage of issues
raised per
package—measured
by the corresponding
posts in the message
board
• Number of messages
exchanged per
issue—measured as
the number of replies
to an issue
• Percentage of issue
repetition across
packages of the same
family—extracted
from content analysis
of the corresponding
posts; it will point
out issues emerging
regardless of the
package
• Percentage of
irrelevant or
inappropriate issues
per
package—extracted
from content analysis
of the corresponding
post
• % of messages
consolidated during
the norming
stage—measured as
average time for
resolving an issue
• Percentage of issues
that result in a
consensus—
measured from the
corresponding posts
in the message
board; it reveals
squad capability to
solve problems
• % of issues that
result to a
dead-end—measured
from content analysis
of the corresponding
posts and indicating
sensitive issues
• % of issues
consolidated into
rules; measure of the
squad’s ability to
combine options
• Package activities
being tailored by end
users
• Popularity of activity
instances
• Cross-activity
analysis (i.e., how
does choice of a
certain activity relate
to choices made for
another activity)
• Percentage of posts
reporting successful
completion of an
assigned activity
• Percentage of posts
reporting problems
in the completion of
an assigned activity
• Percentage of
successfully
completed packages
• Percentage of
unsuccessfully
completed packages
6.1.1 Vacation package neighborhood structure and squad composition
Two issues of particular interest to the researcher in our virtual ethnographies are vacation package neighborhood structure and squad composition. The former provides
insight to the squad’s mission by identifying the neighborhoods involved in the package, while the latter indicates the members who have committed resources to a squad
and its mission. The squad forming stage tool provides moderators with useful information on both these items. To facilitate this we have extended an open source 2D
graphical toolkit, namely prefuse (http://prefuse.org/) in order to build dynamic
visualizations such as that depicted in Fig. 9, offering insights to both neighborhood
structure (and substructures) and squad composition.
Leaf nodes in the graph represent business partners registered to a neighborhood
and offering specific type of services. This visual layout may change as the squad
proceeds in the forming stage, thus indicating members committing resources and
members opting out. Moreover, interactive search is also supported based on keywords and uses color for depicting search results. Similar visualizations can be built
for all active squads, thus allowing not only intra-squad structural analysis but also
inter-squad comparisons especially for vacation packages having similar or identical
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Fig. 8 Moderator’s view of social exchanges in a package (top) and ‘list-to-do’ items (bottom)
Electronic community factories: the model and its application
71
Fig. 9 Assessment of structural properties of an eKoNES squad
neighborhood demands. A squad moderator can easily deduce members who constantly commit or avoid committing resources to squads as well as members who
progressively decide to opt out from a squad. Further insight as to the reasons leading
to these behaviors may be obtained by content analysis of the corresponding time
stamped posts in the squad’s message board.
6.1.2 Raising issues and making proposals
Another key question addressed in our virtual ethnographies relates to the knowledge management that takes place in an operating squad. This entails creative and
reflective responses by all members of the squad leading to persistent posts through
the message board. Such exchanges may include requests for clarifications, posting
issues to be resolved and taking position against issue resolution proposals. In our
current implementation, these are considered as social interaction taking place during the squad’s storming stage. Moderators can obtain quick overviews of the state of
affairs in a storming stage by visualizing the collective contributions of the members.
It should be noted that the squad members are not actually aware that such contributions are part of the storming phase. In fact the squad lifecycle stages are transparent
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Fig. 10 Assessment of issues raised/pending during the storming stage
to the squad members. It is the system’s responsibility to classify the contributions
and the moderator’s task to make sense of such data and accordingly update the issues
to be addressed, propose solutions and solicit contributions.
Moderators obtain detailed insight to the state of affairs during the storming phase
through a dedicated tool (see Fig. 10) depicting graphically the relevant parts of the
asynchronous discussion. This tool visualizes the current topics, issues raised as well
as the proposals submitted for consideration in a temporal fashion. Upon start of
the storming phase, the moderator defines a number of “Default Issues” (see lower
section of the graph), representing common concerns across packages of the same
family. Subsequent posts to message board represent time-stamped contributions to
storming. As shown, the moderator can access all the topics (see upper part of the
graph titled “topics”) identified by squad members and assess their popularity (i.e.,
number of reports marked as red lines), temporal sequence (time runs from top to bottom) and the corresponding issues. Moderators can also raise issues as needed (see
lower left hand side dialog in Fig. 10). Decoding the information presented to the
moderator in Fig. 10 provides useful insights to the running situation. Specifically,
the topic “Bus Strike” was the first to be identified and has gained a high degree of
popularity as several reports have being posted (lines marked in the topics lifeline).
On the grounds of this evidence, the moderator (or a squad member) declares a corresponding issue (oval artifact entitled “Bus strike issue” at the “issues” section) to be
resolved. Similarly, the topic “Bad weather” was initiated after the topic “Bus strike”
with no popularity, thus no declaration of corresponding issue. The topic “Payment
Electronic community factories: the model and its application
73
problem” represents a squad member’s post reporting inability to handle certain type
of payment. It appears that other partners share this concern, which justifies its qualification as an issue (see oval artifact titled “Payment issue” at the “issues” section). It
is also useful to notice that issues are color-coded to reflect their solution state. Thus
green color (see “Payment issue”) means that there is consensus on a solution, while
yellow color (see “Bus strike issue”) means that there is still ongoing discussion about
the solution.
The above is illustrative of both the kind of information exchanged by squad
members in their effort to clarify the mission (i.e., vacation package) as well as the
knowledge built and consolidated. The information extracted may be used for a variety of purposes. It consolidates social interactions between squad members taking
place within a specified time period. It provides an interactive memory archive of
the squad’s progressive accomplishments. It offers a type of design rationale and justification for certain decisions such as what issues are raised, when and why, what
solutions are suggested and how popular they are. Finally, it may be used to distinguish active and creative squad members from passive observers, as well as issues
and proposals recurring across similar missions.
6.1.3 Assessing individual and collective response to issues raised
Squad members can express their opinion on the issues raised and the proposals submitted by voting positively, negatively or indifferently to a given proposal. Voting is
performed through the “Voting for solution” tab (see top screen in Fig. 11) of the
business partner client toolkit. Solution proposals are presented in a list (see middle part of the tool) and squad members vote using the appropriate “vote selection”
control. Squad members are also presented with information on how other members
have voted both in textual and graphical form. It is important to mention that the
squad members’ behavior as manifested in this stage is package-specific and does
not bind the members’ actions in other packages. This allows, amongst other things,
cross-package analysis and may be useful for understanding the behavior of members
across different missions.
A squad reaches agreement on how the mission is to be executed by consolidating all issues raised and codifying them into norms and rules covering global quality attributes or constraints of the package (i.e., discount policies per neighborhood,
temporal constraints for neighborhood activities). Collectively these norms constitute the agreed protocol for compiling the package, thus binding conditions for all
squad members engaged in the assembly of the specific package. To reach and synthesize such agreements, the moderator needs overviews of collective social behavior.
Figure 11 (bottom) provides an example of such collective behavior with regards to
issues raised and the submitted proposals. As shown, the graphic presents the members’ votes on proposals for different issues. Using the corresponding tabbed pane
(see lower left part of the screen in the bottom of Fig. 11), moderators can elaborate on the designated issues and the proposals made. The collective opinion of the
quad members is presented graphically as shown in the upper part of Fig. 11 (bottom). Once again, colors such as green, red and gray are used to denote respectively
members supporting, opposing or being indifferent to a proposal.
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Fig. 11 Business partner voting in the storming stage (top) and consensus creation (bottom)
6.1.4 The performing stage and work in progress
The final stage in the squad life cycle is performing. This overlaps with the tailoring workflow as well as the execution of the package. Figure 12 is representative
Electronic community factories: the model and its application
75
Fig. 12 Visualizing work in progress
of the type of information available to moderators during this stage. The graphic on
the top of the screen is an interactive visualization of archival data contributed by
customers (circular zones) regarding specific activities (middle linear part) and the
involved squad members (bottom circle). The visualization makes use of the concept of social zone to depict progress made by state and status. The moderator can
query the graph using direct manipulation to obtain progress-oriented information on
activities, squad members and specific customers. The tabular notation in the lower
left part of the user interface offers additional querying capabilities. According to the
information extracted, the moderator may initiate the appropriate action related to a
specific activity or squad member.
6.1.5 Knowledge management with the ECF
One primary contribution of the virtual ethnographies described earlier is to provide
insights to knowledge management facilitated by the ECF. There are two issues of
particular interest in the context of our current work, namely discovering ‘hidden’
or emergent communities and extracting patterns and codifying reusable experience.
Identifying ‘hidden’ communities reveals periodic or permanent clusters formed dynamically as a result of exchanges between members of a social network. In the context of our reference scenario two types of clusters have been found to occur. The first
is unintentional clustering between members from different neighborhoods resulting
from customers’ purchasing behaviors as codified during the vacation package tailoring stage. Such clustering can be detected by interactive queries on the visualization
of Fig. 12. Thus, it may turn out that a specific neighborhood activity is preferred
both by elderly people and business travelers with each ‘hidden’ community being
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designated or implied by choice of neighborhood members. Making this type of information explicitly available is useful for setting, targeting or revising marketing
strategies. Another type of clustering is designated by cross-neighborhood coalitions
(i.e., specific members of a neighborhood that tend to be associated with specific
members of another neighborhood). For instance taverns near by a historical site may
be more popular than taverns farther away. In this case, the cluster becomes a community within a community with possible negative implications.
Being able to identify or allowing for ‘hidden’ communities may not always be
beneficial to the community of practice as a whole. Indeed, there may be negative
effects such as community desegregation (i.e., establishment of new neighborhoods),
which in turn, may damage the community’s stability, coherence and members’ trust.
Since the practice-specific toolkit tracks all interactive exchanges between the members of a squad, it is possible for moderators to proactively prevent such negative
consequences. Specifically, extracting useful information (such as partner clustering
and cliques, active squad members, members constantly disagreeing or withdrawing from squads, or deviating from agreed policies), allows moderators to eliminate
or avoid unfair antagonistic behaviors which may damage the community’s stability
leading to providers opting out, internal clustering of members, etc.
The second relevant issue amounts to the ECF’s support for recording and extracting patterns of behavior and codifying them as reusable experience by competent moderators. One type of such reusable experience is codified as new package
families. In recent work we have used components of the ECF to build informationbased products such as semester course plans, trade fairs and conference program
schedules using the basic technologies of the ECF [3]. Another type of packaged
experience is to be found in the reusable toolkit libraries used to build and visualize elements of a package family. To this end, the current implementation of the
ECF supports a small set of advanced interaction platform administration mechanisms, namely toolkit augmentation, expansion and integration, which allow the construction of domain-oriented and metaphor-specific interactive vocabularies [2]. As
these strategies are programming-intensive, it is useful to introduce augmented, expanded or integrated objects as parameterized, reusable and extensible software components allowing for different package families and alternative metaphoric representations.
6.2 Thematic workshops & qualitative assessments
Virtual ethnographies were followed by thematic workshops in an attempt to feed
subjective opinion of participants in virtual ethnographies into the research team. One
key outcome of these workshops is the catalytic influence of non-technological factors in the uptake of the ECF as an operational business model. Each workshop was
organized in two stages. In the first stage the research team reported the consolidated
experience of the virtual ethnography, as revealed by the tools of the ECF discussed
earlier. Then workshop members could respond and justify their online behavior, express comments and discuss issues. At the end of the workshop each member should
complete a questionnaire and return it back. So far we have organized three thematic
workshops corresponding to three virtual ethnographic studies, with each involving
different business partners.
Electronic community factories: the model and its application
77
It turns out that end users (i.e., potential customers) are highly motivated and very
willing to use such tools so as to plan their effective time on vacation and minimize
unforeseen or unexpected events. They appreciate the added value of the assembled
products, the options offered, the interaction with one moderator rather than the individual partners, as well as the feedback loop established between them and other
users as well as the virtual community of practice. Some users addressed the issue of
using systems such as eKoNES not only for planning their time on vacation but also
for deciding on candidate destinations. However, this scenario could not be practically tested. In terms of shortcomings, end users expressed a concern regarding the
lack of guarantee that their request will be processed and responded in due time as
well as fear that the actual experience may deviate from the virtual good presented
through the community portal. To this end, they would value highly the availability
of tools for expressing opinion about a package and assessing other people’s experience prior to deciding. Thus far, the end users’ input although valuable, it has not
revealed something which would radically change or influence the components or the
operation of the ECF.
In contrast, the experience and feedback of the business partners (i.e., members of
electronic squads) as codified in their responses in the questionnaires but also as expressed openly in the course of the thematic workshops were much more interesting.
Our initial assumption was that they would appreciate eKoNES as a complementary
line of business to what they are already doing and a medium for building crossorganizational virtual alliances for appropriating the benefits of virtual networking
was only partially supported. It turned out that this view is only appreciated by nonmarket institutions (i.e., chamber of commerce, local government agencies and some
union representatives) and very small and medium sized enterprises offering specific
type of services such as accommodation or food and beverage. Representatives of
these sectors considered that eKoNES is ideal as a regional information service provided that it is actively supported and maintained. The vast majority of respondents
representing tour operators, transportation unions and multi-function vacation establishments such as luxury hotels, expressed the opinion that they would like eKoNES
as their own model of operation, empowering liaisons and links with their own existing partners in various sectors of the industry. This opinion was largely attributed to
the negative connotation assigned to ‘collective artifacts’ and ‘collective ownership
of virtual assets’. Participants in this category considered that such artifacts are associated with high risks and cannot be operationally controlled and managed. Considering whether they would be willing to introduce an eKoNES-like operational model
in their own organization all of them responded positively and rated highly both the
technical approach adopted by the ECF and the new opportunities it offers.
7 Summary and conclusions
In this paper, we have described the ECF, its building blocks and how it is substantiated in the eKoNES project. The ECF is intended as a model for a specific type of
communities of practice which aim to create value by appropriating the benefits of
‘boundary’ practices for information-based new product development. Such boundary practices are disclosed through the design of interactive vocabularies, process
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and artifacts constituting a new virtual practice to be internalized by members. The
results of engaging in boundary practices are both tangible and tacit. Tacit results may
be experienced by members as new competence and improvements in both products
and processes. Tangible results are codified as new products of added-value resulting from the fact that none of the individual members can, by themselves, build and
offer the product effectively and efficiently. Moreover, as products are assembled
within the scope of a product family, they are easily customizable to address diverse
customer requirements. Analyzing customer preferences and how the respective electronic squad responds to address them enables the extraction of patterns of successful practices which can be appropriated through defining new product families. As
a result, the ECF aims to foster innovation by specialization or differentiation, as
well as to deepen collective and individual professional knowledge (as members’ encounter new opportunities and establish new positions) by facilitating the required
processes.
The ECF as proposed and described in the previous sections offers two main contributions to the research community. Firstly, it presents an operational model which
allows members of value creating cross-organization virtual communities of practice
to engage in the practice the community is about and to carry out mission-specific
social and collaborative activities. Secondly, the ECF offers an appropriate software
platform and tools which allow the assembly of innovative information-based products from models and visual components suited to a designated application domain.
In terms of competing models, our experience indicates that the ECF is distinctively
different from on-line communities and virtual communities of practice in at least
two different dimensions. First of all, an ECF is not only concerned with computermediated communication, information sharing or community building and maintenance. Instead, it seeks to provide an environment supporting collaborative engagement in the practice the community is about. As such, it requires the establishment
of a common practice-oriented vocabulary and a framework for executing statements
built with this vocabulary. Secondly, moderators in the ECF assume different functions (aimed at attaining squad stability and knowledge management) than moderators of online communities and virtual communities of practice. Thirdly, the ECF
frames practices in relation to workflows, processes, tools and artifacts in addition
to social interactions between members. To this end, it exploits a particular type of a
factory setup which smoothly integrates the practice-specific toolkit with the community support system (i.e., the portal). Such a factory setup is not only about assembling
applications through patterns, but also about continuous process improvement.
In conclusion, the ECF as described in this paper is not without flaws or limitations. In spite of its sound engineering baseline, it offers no mechanism to guarantee
either effective community management or intuitive engagement in the practice the
community is about. It presupposes a certain maturity level on behalf of the members as well as commitment to collaboration for appropriating the benefits of virtual
networking. Consequently, it is likely to be valuable in cultivated communities of
practice whose underlying practice is not exhausted in social interaction, while their
members exhibit strong sense of community, mutual trust and willingness to share
resources and engage in a joint enterprise using a common repertoire. In this sense it
is a tool for fostering rather than designing virtual communities of practice.
Electronic community factories: the model and its application
79
Acknowledgements The present work was carried out in the context of KP-25 (eKoNES project) which
was co-funded by the General Secretariat for Research and Technology of the Greek Ministry of Development, in the context of the Regional Operational Program of Crete, Action line 1.2 “Research and
Development consortia in strategic priority areas”. The author wishes to acknowledge the support of the
members of istlab (http://www.istl.teiher.gr/).
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Demosthenes Akoumianakis is an Associate Professor at the Department of Applied Information Technology & Multimedia, Technological Education Institution of Crete. He is also the founder and Director
of the interactive Software and Systems Engineering Laboratory (iSTLab, http://www.istl.teiher.gr/). He received a BA (Hons) in Computing
in Business from The University of Huddersfield (1990) and MSc and
PhD degrees in Human Computer Interaction from the University of
Kent at Canterbury, UK in 1995 and 1999 respectively. His work in his
final year dissertation was awarded the 1st IBM prize from the Department of Computing & Mathematics of the University of Huddersfield.
He is actively involved in various national and European collaborative
research and development projects, with emphasis on tools for scenariobased requirements engineering, on-line communities, multiple user interfaces and the development of collaborative technologies and toolkits.
Prof Akoumianakis has published widely in referred archival scientific
journals, international conferences and workshops and is the author/co-author of several books. He also
serves as a member of the scientific committee for various established archival journals, international conferences and national/international standards bodies.