Sensitizing concepts for the next community-oriented technologies: shifting focus from social networking to convivial artifacts

Abstract

This paper proposes a set of sensitizing concepts for the evolution of technologies supporting both online and hybrid communities. These concepts regard the affordances that a network community and its technological infrastructure should offer to its members, grounding and extending the notion of network communities and the related concepts proposed in the literature; in particular, we focus on the community affordance we denote as conviviality, and discuss it in light of several previous research contributions to see it as an important facet of community interaction that should orient the design of its enabling technology. To this aim, the paper also proposes an initial set of three principles that should inform the design of convivial artifacts, namely bounded openness, collaboration-orientedness and selective inclusiveness, and illustrate them with some examples as further sensitizing concepts for the Communities & Technologies field.