Toward Cultural Representation and Identification for All in Community-Based Virtual Environments

The paper describes research undertaken to provide the empirical basis for engendering group or community identification in future iterations of an adaptive community-based collaborative virtual environment (CVE) designed to facilitate communication where there are mutual concerns or interests among virtual communities within or across organizations. The system taken as an example in this paper consists of a WWW-based collaborative virtual environment comprised of intelligent software agents that support explicit information sharing, chance meetings, and real time informal communication. Results from ethnography, questionnaires, and Persona design inform future directions that include cultural cues in intelligent community-based systems in order to enhance information sharing and real time communication among strangers toward more equitable cultural representation for all. It is argued that users' experiences are enhanced in community-based virtual environments through supporting intercultural communication and designing opportunities for equitable representation of and identification with individual, group, and organizational cultures.

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