Task Number 4 was to read an assigned paper and introduce the main concepts of this paper to the rest of the Seminary.
We had to read the Paper User Motivation in Peer-to-peer Systems.
It is about Comtella, a P2P System for the exchange of resources, e.g. Papers, used at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada.
The problem with the system was that it’s technical functionallity was good, but there were not many Users online and due to this fact not many Resources were found.
The Team of Comtella looked for a Solution to this problem and tried to solve it by implementing a hierachical membership model, where Users get a higher Level when they do more for the Community (e.g. share Resources, stay online, …) and get better Functions with each level.
They implemented this motivation model into Comtella in a testphase for one course. The results of this testphase were that more users used Comtella more often and the Quanity of the avaiable resources increased, but also that the overall Quality of the resources decreased.