Knowledge Generation and Dissemination in Virtual Communities and Virtual Teams

In recent years, the creation of Internet-based knowledge has become increasingly significant. However, with regard to the influence and control of knowledge management processes, knowledge communities indicate specific problems for creating and distributing information. People – constantly or temporarily – without Internet access are left out of this knowledge dissemination. The CCIRP project takes problems of this kind into account, creating concepts how information generation in knowledge communities (e.g. CC-Expert) or in virtual teams, and how this knowledge can be distributed based on traditional media. The paper describes two approaches (within the context of the project CCIRP) that deal with knowledge generation and dissemination. CC-Expert is a tool for virtual communities (open user group) and VITEA for virtual teams (closed user groups), which were realised at the university of Koblenz, Germany. The approach VITEA shows how the knowledge generation and dissemination in virtual teams can be improved. It offers an environment to disseminate knowledge to team members without Internet access or with temporarily no access or even where Internet access is more inconvenient than using other media. In the VITEA-System the technologies of a reference lab and a virtual community are combined. One focus are the common aspects and differences and another the methods of knowledge generation and how to distribute knowledge by using heterogeneous media

End-user perspectives on the Adoption of Wireless Applications: Price of Convenience and a Model for Contextual Analysis

Information services delivered via wireless, portable communication devices continue to pervade our work and leisure spaces. While people are continuously bombarded with promises of newer and better ways to maintain contact with others and to have constant access to information, however, there remain a number of open issues that inhibit the potential for an open information society. The bidirectional influence between such wireless technologies and applications and their potential end-users, contributes to the development of both the technologies and applications and the social setting in which they are embedded. In this paper, we extend current studies of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) uptake by integrating interpretations of “ubiquitous computing” and its pervasion of everyday life. We draw upon findings from a range of IS research to structure our future studies of adoption issues in relation to a variety of wireless application cases. We show that, while some “traditional” IS/IT dimensions of uptake still hold, there are now a variety of other “non- utilitarian (hedonic)” factors that developers and designers need to take into account. We conclude by proposing a research model – expanded from model of user acceptability and product uptake, a descriptive framework based on the “Price of Convenience”(Ng-Kruelle, Swatman, Rebne and Hampe 2002)