Dr. Marco Prestipino

"When thinking about the way people use virtual communities, I find the most extraordinary change is the move from socializing, communicating and looking for information towards coordinating. Teens organize appointments easier on a public blog than by using phone or other private communication means. The reach of the internet, its usability and the competency of its users have grown tremendously. On the other hand, privacy concerns have become rare."

Nothing illustrates these points better than myspace.com, the community that has drawn the attention of the media because of its growth to millions of millions of users. Alexandra Bröhm of Swiss weekly newspaper "Sonntagszeitung" interviewed me while doing research for an article about myspace.com.

• Lead researcher project "Online Tourism Community Support" funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF)
• cooperative knowledge management
• Human-Computer-Interaction issues in computer supported cooperation

MyTravelBooK: information and communication support for travelers
This project aims at implementing ideas from my research on virtual communities. The main goal is to enable shared knowledge creation, personal and cooperative trip planning in an open virtual community.

Whereas travel information used to be created by few professional guidebook authors, now a large community of traveler will distributedly contribute. Always updatable, provided by many people in a transparent and peer reviewed manner, it will create an universal and free information source as wikipedia did for encyclopaedic information.

MyTravelBooK combines several tools (Blog, Wiki, discussion forums) using a geographic structure as the main connection. Thus the disadvantages of the single tool are avoided. For details on my research, pleae see my publications.

• Aschoff, R.; Prestipino, M. & Schwabe, G. Cooperation technology and timeliness of information: Comparing travelbooks, wikis and online communities. Accepted for ECIS 2007.
• Prestipino, M. (with Christoph Häusler). Exploring Mobile Tourism-Communities. Presentation for the Symposion "ICT Support for Creative Teams" at HICSS 2007.
• Prestipino, M., Aschoff, F.-R., Schwabe, G. (2007). How up-to-date are Online Tourism Communities? An Empirical Evaluation of Commercial and Non-Commercial Information Quality. 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-40). Waikoloa, Big Island, Hawaii, January 3-6, 2007.pdf)
• Prestipino, M., Aschoff, R., Schwabe, G.: What’s the use of guidebooks in the age of collaborative media? Empirical Evaluation of free and commercial travel information". 19th Bled eConference eValues June 5 - 7, 2006, Bled, Slovenia
• Neue Reiseinformation, neues Reisen. Presentation at the Collegium Generale, University of Bern, 18.01.2006
• Prestipino, M., From Information Behaviour of Independent Travellers to Requirements for Information Systems. ENTER 2006, Lausanne, Switzerland.
• Prestipino, M., Creating knowledge in Virtual Communities. Presentation at Wikimania, 2005 Frankfurt.
• Prestipino, M., "Community Based Electronic Guidebooks", Proceedings of CollECTeR Europe 2005 12/12 Juni, 2005, Furtwangen.
• Schwabe. G.; Prestipino, M.: How Tourism Communities can change travel information quality. 13th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) 2005, Regensburg, Germany.
• Samuel Kuster, Andreas Löber, Marco Prestipino, Gerhard Schwabe: Same Time, Same Place, New Friend. Conference Proceedings Mensch und Computer 2005
• Prestipino, M.; Schwabe. G.: Tourismus-Communities als Informationssysteme. In Ferstl, O. K., Sinz, E. J., Eckert, S., and Isselhorst, T., editors: Proceedings of 7. Internationale Tagung Wirtschaftsinformatik 23.-25.02.2005, pp. 1083–1102, Physica-Verlag, Heidelberg..
• Prestipino, M.: Supporting Collaborative Information Spaces for Tourists Conference Proceedings, Mensch und Computer 2004 , 5. – 8. September 2004, Paderborn (Download PDF).
• Prestipino, M.: Kooperative Wissensgenerierung in virtuellen Communities und ihre technische Unterstützung. Workshop Virtual Communities & Mobility, Technische Universität München, 27/28 Juni 2003
• Schwabe. G.; Prestipino, M.: Wissensintensive Dienstleistungen im Internet: Teledienstleistungen und kollaborative Wissensgenerierung. Das Wirtschaftsstudium 5/2003
• Prestipino, M.: User Interfaces for Information Appliances. i-com, Zeitschrift für interaktive und kooperative Medien, 2002, Issue 02
• Prestipino, M.: Reifegradmodelle zur wissensorientierten Prozessverbesserung bei der Entwicklung gebrauchstauglicher Software. Master Thesis, Universität Konstanz, Januar 2002

Seminar Information Management: "Social Web", Summer 2007

Ackerman, Pipek,Wulf (Hrsg.): Sharing Expertise: Beyond Knowledge Management. This review to appear in I-COM.