Designing and evaluating voice-based virtual communities
Neil B. Patel · 2010
Voice-based virtual communities offer new possibilities for information dissemination and sharing for billions of users who lack access to Internet-connected PCs. As interaction is only through voice, these systems are subject to different design constraints than web-based social software. Through lab experiments and fieldwork, we have identified three key design challenges for voice-based virtual communities: supporting threaded conversations; indexing and searching content; and managing identity. We discuss each of these issues and propose approaches to address them. We also present plans to evaluate the impact of voice-based virtual communities on knowledge access and sharing in rural India.