Social Media and the Public Sector

{Excerpt} Social media is revolutionizing the way we live, learn, work, and play. Elements of the private sector have begun to thrive on opportunities to forge, build, and deepen relationships. Some are transforming their organizational structures and opening their corporate ecosystems in consequence. The public sector is a relative newcomer. It too can drive stakeholder involvement and satisfaction. Global conversations, especially among Generation Y, were born circa 2004. Beginning 1995 until then, the internet had hosted static, one-way websites. These were places to visit passively, retrieve information from, and perhaps post comments about by electronic mail. Sixteen years later, Web 2.0 enables many-to-many connections in numerous domains of interest and practice, powered by the increasing use of blogs, image and video sharing, mashups, podcasts, ratings, Really Simple Syndication, social bookmarking, tweets, widgets, and wikis, among others. Today, people expect the internet to be user-centric

Understanding the Platform Economy: Signals, Trust, and Social Interaction

Two-sided markets are gaining increasing importance. Examples include accommodation and car sharing, resale, shared mobility, crowd work, and many more. As these businesses rely on transactions among users, central aspects to virtually all platforms are the creation and maintenance of trust. While research has considered effects of trust-building on diverse platforms in isolation, the overall platform landscape has received much less attention. However, cross-platform comparison is important since platforms vary in their degree of social interaction, which, as we demonstrate in this paper, determines the adequacy and use of different trust mechanisms. Based on actual market data, we examine the mechanisms platforms employ and how frequent users rely on them. We contrast this view against survey data on users’ perceptions of the context-specific importance of these trust-building tools. Our findings provide robust evidence for our reasoning on the relation between platforms’ degree of social interaction and the associated expressive trust cues

Takeaway Trust: A market data perspective on reputation portability in electronic commerce

Reputation has become a key factor within today’s online platform landscape. In particular for sellers in electronic commerce, the management of reputation as a signal of trustworthiness has become a relevant business activity. Prior studies have focused on either the role of reputation within given (but platform-bound) environments or general data portability between platforms. The question of cross-platform reputation portability, however, has thus far achieved much less attention. With this exploratory work, we present survey data on consumers’ perception of portable reputation in the platform economy and a case study based on actual (seller) market data from an e commerce marketplace. Our results show that consumers are generally receptive for imported seller reputation. However, for seller ratings to function as an effective signaling device across platform boundaries, adequate means of representation have yet to be found

Essays on Crowdfunding Adoption and Behavior

The aim of this dissertation is to examine aspects of crowdfunding adoption and behavior. Accordingly, the overarching research question answered by this dissertation is: what influences crowdfunding backers’ contribution intentions and behaviors? The dissertation answers this question while focusing on dimensions of trust, community, and technological acceptance. The dissertation is made up of three studies with one conceptual article (study 1), and two empirical studies (study 2 and 3). The conceptual study marries marketing and trust literatures and contextualizes their implications for the crowdfunding context. The result is the development of a framework of trust-based marketing strategies for crowdfunding campaigns, building on the understanding of the critical role played by trust in crowdfunding adoption by prospective backers. The empirical studies (i.e., study 2 and 3), are based on the analyses of empirical data collected from actual platform users, while using Structural Equation Model techniques. These studies examine the antecedents of backers’ contribution intentions and behavior, specifically in the context of reward crowdfunding in Finland. Study 2 explains backers’ intention and behavior by testing the extensive version of the technology acceptance model (TAM). It confirms the relevance of the TAM model for properly capturing influential antecedents of backers’ financial contribution intentions and behavior and further elaborates on the specific influences of backers’ experiences and voluntariness, which challenge existing conceptualizations from other information and communication technology -related contexts. Study 3 builds on the view of crowdfunding as an embedded phenomenon in online communities, to develop a community-based crowdfunding framework for explaining backers’ contribution intentions and behaviors, while highlighting the roles of community identification and community trust.publishedVersio

Unlocking Online Reputation – On the Effectiveness of Cross-Platform Signaling in the Sharing Economy

With the ever-growing popularity of sharing economy platforms, complementors increasingly face the challenge to manage their reputation on different plat- forms. The paper reports the results from an experimental online survey to investigate how and under which condi- tions online reputation is effective to engender trust across platform boundaries. It shows that (1) cross-platform sig- naling is in fact a viable strategy to engender trust and that (2) its effectiveness crucially depends on source–target fit. Implications for three stakeholders are discussed. First, platform complementors may benefit from importing rep- utation, especially when they have just started on a new platform and have not earned on-site reputation yet. The results also show, however, that importing reputation (even if it is excellent) may be detrimental if there occurs a mismatch between source and target and that, hence, fit is of utmost importance. Second, regulatory authorities may consider reputation portability as a means to make platform boundaries more permeable and hence to tackle lock-in effects. Third, platform operators may employ cross-plat- form signaling as a competitive lever

In Stars We Trust – A Note on Reputation Portability Between Digital Platforms

Complementors accumulate reputation on an ever-increasing number of online platforms. While the effects of reputation within individual platforms are well-understood, its potential effectiveness across platform boundaries has received much less attention. This research note considers complementors’ ability to increase their trustworthiness in the eyes of prospective consumers by importing reputational data from another platform. The study evaluates this potential lever by means of an online experiment, during which specific combinations of on-site and imported rating scores are tested. Results reveal that importing reputation can be advantageous – but also detrimental, depending on ratings’ values. Implications for complementors, platform operators, and regulatory bodies concerned with online reputation are considered

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Open-TEE - An Open Virtual Trusted Execution Environment

Hardware-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are widely deployed in mobile devices. Yet their use has been limited primarily to applications developed by the device vendors. Recent standardization of TEE interfaces by GlobalPlatform (GP) promises to partially address this problem by enabling GP-compliant trusted applications to run on TEEs from different vendors. Nevertheless ordinary developers wishing to develop trusted applications face significant challenges. Access to hardware TEE interfaces are difficult to obtain without support from vendors. Tools and software needed to develop and debug trusted applications may be expensive or non-existent. In this paper, we describe Open-TEE, a virtual, hardware-independent TEE implemented in software. Open-TEE conforms to GP specifications. It allows developers to develop and debug trusted applications with the same tools they use for developing software in general. Once a trusted application is fully debugged, it can be compiled for any actual hardware TEE. Through performance measurements and a user study we demonstrate that Open-TEE is efficient and easy to use. We have made Open- TEE freely available as open source.Comment: Author's version of article to appear in 14th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications, TrustCom 2015, Helsinki, Finland, August 20-22, 201