HIIT at CSCW 2014: Network Hospitality and Account Sharing

HIIT researchers Airi Lampinen and Tapio Ikkala are contributing to timely debates on the sharing economy with their new research, published this week at the internationally renowned ACM CSCW 2014 conference. The conference is held this year in Baltimore in the United States. CSCW is the largest annual research conference focusing on computer-supported cooperative work.

Lampinen's full paper, titled Account Sharing in the Context of Networked Hospitality Exchange (pdf, slides), examines account sharing in the context of networked hospitality exchange. Lampinen discusses the dynamics of account sharing based on a qualitative interview study with multi-person households who offer to host visitors via Couchsurfing.org. Findings reveal that multi-person households that engage in account sharing face several challenges, including presenting multiple people in one profile, coordinating negotiations over access to domestic space, and representing in a fair way the reputation hosts have accumulated together over time. Amidst the rising rhetoric of a ‘reputation economy’, this paper calls for engaging the inclusions, exclusions, and inequalities that reputation metrics may renew or create, especially if they fail to acknowledge people’s account sharing practices. The paper also encourages adopting a design focus beyond individuals in order to support maintaining shared accounts and interacting with others through them. The findings have implications for a variety of hospitality exchange services, other collaborative consumption systems and further online systems, such as those that facilitate online creative collaborations.