Evaluating user-generated content creation across contexts and cultures

Aspects like networked collaboration and participation define the recent information and knowledge society. “Participation means that technologies, resources, organizations, and skills enable humans to design and manage their social systems all by themselves and to develop collective visions of a better future so that collective intelligence can emerge”. In this sense, participation is also defined as a process of empowering humans. Thousands of connected individuals can already actively participate in innovation and social development in ways we once only dreamed of. New technologies (not only the Internet also mobile technologies) are enabling people to become active content producers, to share content with others and even to co-create networked experiences based on their own user-generated content. Flikr, YouTube, MySpace and other thriving online communities already transcend social networking and pioneer a new form of collaborative generation of audiovisual content and the emergence of a new networked user experience. Some valuable products have already come out of this collective knowledge. This paper proposes an evaluation approach for user-generated content creation, while emphasising why people participate in sharing and co-creating user-generated content. A special focus is on how user experience and user acceptance can be approached within this process based on special defined parameters. Parts of the user experience are for example the user involvement and user engagement factors, which are especially relevant for community building. To support the presented evaluation approach we draw on recent knowledge in peer-to-peer networks, where people share content files containing audio, video, data or anything in digital format. Moreover, preliminary input can be gained from approaches in the game community research. This paper is mainly approaching user experience aspects and discussing it from a theoretical perspective and for different contexts and cultures. In addition, some use cases are presented, which outline some future trends for user-generated content and the challenges for user evaluation.

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