Transparent Community: Creating a Novel Community Framework Using P2P Technologies

In the conventional online communities such as chat systems, bulletin boards and listservers, users who actively provide information are considered valuable, while users who visit online communities just to collect information tend to be regarded as non-contributors. We propose that we should facilitate the latter group of users to turn into active information providers by introducing a novel framework into online communities. We call this new community framework “transparent community.” In transparent communities, each user is required to have his/her independent information inventory that can be referred to each other. In this context, we made use of SIONet (Hoshiai et al., 2001), a novel peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture, as an enabling technology to build a communityware prototype which we call “WineDiary.” In this paper, we verify the possibility of this novel community framework through the results of user testing on WineDiary.