Everyday favors

This paper presents a local online gift exchange system, Kassi, and a seven-month case study of its use, and analyzes users' motivations to contribute to the system and the community.

Abstract

This paper focuses on online gift exchange in a setting where online and offline interactions are tightly intertwined and most of the exchanges require face-to-face interaction to be completed. We present a local online gift exchange system, Kassi, and a seven-month case study of its use. Based on survey material and logs of system usage, we analyze users' motivations to contribute to the system and the community. While most users held favorable attitudes towards the system, many reasons for not using the service were found. We set our findings into perspective by discussing different ways of defining participation, measuring use, and qualifying different types of contributions. We argue that when users try to fit a system into their everyday lives, designers should consider supporting such efforts - even if user behavior does not match expectations. Designers who encourage emergent and unanticipated behaviors can enhance users' sense of participation and encourage the leap from intention to realized action.