A Model for Investigating Motivations of Hybrid Wireless Community Participants

Abstract

The emergence of wireless communities offers an attractive alternative to operator-centric models for providing broadband wireless services. While the first attempts of purely self-organized communities have been limited by the difficulty of attracting enough members willing to share their resources with the community, newer hybrid wireless communities (where a firm supports and incentivizes individuals who share their infrastructure in exchange of being able to exploit the network) is developing rapidly. This difference suggests the importance of attracting and motivating members with suitable incentives. While this is widely recognized as a key issue, existing research is limited to pure communities and does not adequately cover hybrid communities. Our research project intends to address this shortcoming by focusing on hybrid communities, building an adapted theoretical model considering specific motivations and collecting empirical evidence using mixed qualitative and quantitative methods like content analysis, interviews and a large-scale survey. As this is a research-in-progress, only the first results of the project are shown, namely an adapted theoretical model and some evidence from a content analysis of hybrid wireless community forums. Participation appears to be motivated by tangible rewards (free network access, revenue sharing), social rewards (socializing with peers and feel part of a community), psychological rewards (pursuing idealistic goals and feeling competent) and intrinsic enjoyment, but hindered by participation efforts (monetary costs and required effort) and other concerns (security, legality and bandwidth use).