From personal to community knowledge : stimulating knowledge sharing among student groups in knowledge management platforms through interaction design

With the recent growth in popularity of collaborative cloud workspaces, there has also been a rise in popularity of community-oriented Knowledge Management Platforms. These services help users gather, represent, store and redistribute information for a range of purposes as a group. In the case of shared academic workspaces aimed at students, however, this collaborative potential has not fully materialized, with knowledge sharing most times being ad hoc and surface-level in nature and occurring in sub-optimal channels. In this paper, I ascertain students' main deterring factors and bottlenecks in the adoption of shared Knowledge Management Platforms through a set of exploratory one-on-one interviews, as well as their main expectations and use cases for participating in a student-oriented Knowledge Management Platform. I validate and quantify the findings of these interviews through an opinion survey with a larger student sample. Afterwards, by employing techniques from the Persuasive Technology field, I propose an interaction-based framework that can be used to tackle the identified pitfalls in a hypothetical shared Knowledge Management Platform through a more context-aware interaction design. Lastly, as a case study and to illustrate the theorized framework, I implement the proposed techniques to the case of Remnote, a Personal Knowledge Management Platform with intentions of transitioning to a more community-oriented business model.