Project Venezia-Gondola (A Framework for P-Commerce)

We have implemented a small-scale peer-to-peer based environ-ment called Comtella, which allows faculty, graduate and under-graduate students to contribute and share URLs of class-relatedresources, like academic and popular articles. The system hasbeen deployed for three months in a university course on ethicsand information technology with thirty-five undergraduate stu-dents. We deployed two motivational strategies to encourageusers to contribute resources. The evaluation results showed asignificant increase in participation and the number of contribu-tions. Future work will focus on ensuring mechanisms for collective quality control of the contributions.