D2: Collective Awareness Platforms: Privacy, incentives, and market dimensions

Online social applications and the integration of sensing devices with mobile communication devices, leverage the heterogeneity of users in terms of interests, preferences, mobility, and enable the generation of various types of virtual (internet-mediated) communities that collectively enrich people’s awareness about their environment and promote new forms of participatory processes and approaches to managing its features. Typically, the platforms that host these communities engage autonomous users and deliver a utility that depends on the participants' number and behaviors. In this respect, the challenge for platform designers is to engage people into mechanisms of active contribution and collaboration. In this deliverable, we investigate different dimensions inherent in these platforms bringing in front the composite socio-psychological incentives that motivate participation, privacy issues and the market viewpoint that may apply to them. We first review formal definitions of virtual communities and related research that introduces criteria for classification of various virtual community paradigms. Relative inputs from theories on the broader context of collective action, public goods' management and social dilemmas have also been accommodated. We then identify and discuss incentives and social mechanisms that are activated in different types of virtual communities, drawing insights and results from social psychology literature and studies on online communities. Finally, we examine existing communities with specific focus on the exposed mechanisms that can affect positively or negatively people's behavior and, ultimately, impact on the community’s delivered utility.