UNDERSTANDING COPRODUCTION IN THE INFORMATION AGE: APPLICATIONS IN LOCAL COMMUNITY CONTEXTS
Open Access
- Author:
- Chen, Jiawei
- Graduate Program:
- Information Sciences and Technology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- April 11, 2019
- Committee Members:
- John M. Carroll, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
John M. Carroll, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Mary Beth Rosson, Committee Member
Aiping Xiong, Committee Member
Scarlett Rae Miller, Outside Member - Keywords:
- coproduction
community
information technology - Abstract:
- Coproduction denotes services and activities that engage active participation of different stakeholders. Beyond simple collaborations, coproduction emphasizes interactions between participants for creating synergies that cannot be achieved by one party alone. Previous studies and applications of coproduction are mainly in the area of public service and marketing research. More recently, coproduction is identified as an important form of interactions in local communities by engaging different community members in social activities with one another. Information and communication technologies have shown their potential to facilitate coproduction opportunities. However, the development of local coproduction systems is hindered by two main challenges: 1) the imbalance between service offers and requests as a result from the divides between providers and recipients in each interaction, and 2) the difficulty for people to identify relevant and convenient opportunities for coproduction activities in a timely fashion. In this dissertation, we present the research investigations in tackling the aforementioned challenges of coproduction practices in the local community supported by information technologies. In addressing the first challenge, we conduct design research and empirical studies to examine coproductions of reciprocal activities in the form of both peer-to-peer exchanges and group initiatives. By designing and prototyping a mobile application, we challenge the opportunities for mobile technologies to support lightweight and opportunistic peer-to-peer coproduction activities that are reciprocal for both initiators and joiners. A user study in the wild reveals potentials of reciprocal coproduction exchanges in strengthening existing social ties and establishing new weak ties in the local community. In order to understand coproductions in the form of group interactions, we conduct field work and interviews to study participation dynamics in Meetup, a leading information infrastructure supporting self-organized offline group gatherings. The findings identify multiple roles beyond the dividing stakeholders of organizers and members, and summarize their behaviors and interaction patterns that coproduce the meetup events, group development, and social connections bringing together local community members. In addressing the second challenge, we study the application of context-aware techniques in the case of transportation-share, an important category of coproduction community services that is highly context sensitive. In a user study of a mobile transportation-share application with context-aware recommendations, the findings show that inter- and intra-relationships between spatio-temporal and community-based social contexts significantly impact users' motivation to request or provide services, which provide novel insights for designing context-aware recommendation algorithms for community coproduction services.