Culture and e-commerce: An exploration of the perceptions and attitudes of Egyptian internet users

This paper examines the perceptions and attitudes that Egyptian users hold towards electronic shopping sites. Internet sites are globally available, opening up huge potential markets for online retailers. However, it remains unclear whether sites designed for the US or European markets will be acceptable in other cultures. This paper describes an exploratory card sorting study conducted with Egyptian consumers. The study was designed to examine the e-commerce interface features that are most salient to this user group and to explore how these relate to user intentions to engage in internet shopping. The results support the role of site familiarity in predicting purchase intentions within this cultural setting

Design Research and Domain Representation

While diverse theories about the nature of design research have been proposed, they are rarely considered in relation to one another across the broader disciplinary field. Discussions of design research paradigms have tended to use overarching binary models for understanding differing knowledge frameworks. This paper focuses on an analysis of theories of design research and the use of Web 3 and open content systems to explore the potential of building more relational modes of conceptual representation. The nature of this project is synthetic, building upon the work of other design theorists and researchers. A number of theoretical frameworks will be discussed and examples of the analysis and modelling of key concepts and information relationships, using concept mapping software, collaborative ontology building systems and semantic wiki technologies will be presented. The potential of building information structures from content relationships that are identified by domain specialists rather than the imposition of formal, top-down, information hierarchies developed by information scientists, will be considered. In particular the opportunity for users to engage with resources through their own knowledge frameworks, rather than through logically rigorous but largely incomprehensible ontological systems, will be explored in relation to building resources for emerging design researchers. The motivation behind this endeavour is not to create a totalising meta-theory or impose order on the ‘ill structured’ and ‘undisciplined’, domain of design. Nor is it to use machine intelligence to ‘solve design problems’. It seeks to create dynamic systems that might help researchers explore design research theories and their various relationships with one another. It is hoped such tools could help novice researchers to better locate their own projects, find reference material, identify knowledge gaps and make new linkages between bodies of knowledge by enabling forms of data-poesis - the freeing of data for different trajectories. Keywords: Design research; Design theory; Methodology; Knowledge systems; Semantic web technologies.</p

Institutionalization and Structuration: Studying the Links between Action and Institution

Institutional theory and structuration theory both contend that institutions and actions are inextricably linked and that institutionalization is best understood as a dynamic, ongoing process. Institutionalists, however, have pursued an empirical agenda that has largely ignored how institutions are created, altered, and reproduced, in part, because their models of institutionalization as a process are underdeveloped. Structuration theory, on the other hand, largely remains a process theory of such abstraction that it has generated few empirical studies. This paper discusses the similarities between the two theories, develops an argument for why a fusion of the two would enable institutional theory to significantly advance, develops a model of institutionalization as a structuration process, and proposes methodological guidelines for investigating the process empirically

Towards a classification framework for social machines

The state of the art in human interaction with computational systems blurs the line between computations performed by machine logic and algorithms, and those that result from input by humans, arising from their own psychological processes and life experience. Current socio-technical systems, known as ‘social machines’ exploit the large-scale interaction of humans with machines. Interactions that are motivated by numerous goals and purposes including financial gain, charitable aid, and simply for fun. In this paper we explore the landscape of social machines, both past and present, with the aim of defining an initial classificatory framework. Through a number of knowledge elicitation and refinement exercises we have identified the polyarchical relationship between infrastructure, social machines, and large-scale social initiatives. Our initial framework describes classification constructs in the areas of contributions, participants, and motivation. We present an initial characterization of some of the most popular social machines, as demonstration of the use of the identified constructs. We believe that it is important to undertake an analysis of the behaviour and phenomenology of social machines, and of their growth and evolution over time. Our future work will seek to elicit additional opinions, classifications and validation from a wider audience, to produce a comprehensive framework for the description, analysis and comparison of social machines

Records management capacity and compliance toolkits : a critical assessment.

This article seeks to present the results of a project that critically evaluated a series of toolkits for assessing records management capacity and/or compliance. These toolkits have been developed in different countries and sectors within the context of the e-environment and provide evidence of good corporate and information governance. Design/methodology/approach - A desk-based investigation of the tools was followed by an electronic Delphi with toolkit developers and performance measurement experts to develop a set of evaluation criteria. Different stakeholders then evaluated the toolkits against the criteria using cognitive walkthroughs and expert heuristic reviews. The results and the research process were reviewed via electronic discussion. Findings - Developed by recognised and highly respected organisations, three of the toolkits are software tools, whilst the fourth is a methodology. They are all underpinned by relevant national/international records management legislation, standards and good practice including, either implicitly or explicitly, ISO 15489. They all have strengths, complementing rather than competing with one another. They enable the involvement of other staff, thereby providing an opportunity for raising awareness of the importance of effective records management. Practical implications - These toolkits are potentially very powerful, flexible and of real value to organisations in managing their records. They can be used for a "quick and dirty" assessment of records management capacity or compliance as well as in-depth analysis. The most important criterion for selecting the appropriate one is to match the toolkit with the scenario. Originality/value - This paper aims to raise awareness of the range and nature of records management toolkits and their potential for varied use in practice to support more effective management of records

User requirement elicitation for cross-language information retrieval

Who are the users of a cross-language retrieval system? Under what circumstances do they need to perform such multi-language searches? How will the task and the context of use affect successful interaction with the system? Answers to these questions were explored in a user study performed as part of the design stages of Clarity, a EU founded project on cross-language information retrieval. The findings resulted in a rethink of the planned user interface and a consequent expansion of the set of services offered. This paper reports on the methodology and techniques used for the elicitation of user requirements as well as how these were in turn transformed into new design solutions

Towards a Framework for Developing Mobile Agents for Managing Distributed Information Resources

Distributed information management tools allow users to author, disseminate, discover and manage information within large-scale networked environments, such as the Internet. Agent technology provides the flexibility and scalability necessary to develop such distributed information management applications. We present a layered organisation that is shared by the specific applications that we build. Within this organisation we describe an architecture where mobile agents can move across distributed environments, integrate with local resources and other mobile agents, and communicate their results back to the user