Studying Technical Mechanisms for Supporting Sharing Communities
Résumé
Enabled by technical platforms, sharing economies have been studied with regard to their economic, legal and social effects, as well as with regard to their possible influences on CSCW topics such as work, collaboration and trust. While a lot of research is ongoing around the sharing economy and related communities, there is little work addressing the phenomenon from a socio-technical point of view. In particular, there is little work in CSCW looking at the technology behind existing platforms, why it was defined this way, what are its impacts, and what would it mean to offer technology that would support local sharing economies in their cooperative activities. Our workshop is meant to address this gap. The aim is to identify research themes and gaps in the related work, and work towards a better understanding of core mechanisms and trade-offs in the design of future and inclusive platforms for the sharing economy.