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CALL FOR PAPERS

2nd Interdisciplinary World Congress on Mass Customization and
Personalization (MCPC2003)

Mini-track on (VIRTUAL) COMMUNITIES AND PERSONALIZATION IN
E-COMMERCE APPLICATIONS

March 1, 2003: submission deadline for extended abstracts
October 6-8, 2003: Conference held in Munich, Germany

http://www11.in.tum.de/conferences/mcpc2003.html


The use of electronic media for economic transactions adds a new
potential to the vendor-buyer relationship. It gives the customer
a voice, an input channel where he or she can participate in a number
of activities such as product development, feedback, support for
other customers, recommendations etc. This can be an active
participation or simply a sharing of preferences. The structuring
and organization of this participation may empower the customer
and may result in new kinds of dynamics in customer collaboration.
This includes the issue of direct collaboration among customers.

The downside of a broadened range of possibilities in interactive
buying is the increasing level of complexity with which the customer
is confronted. It becomes increasingly difficult for customers and
sales staff alike to select from the large set of product variants.
And even if the customer chooses products tailored to her needs, she
usually does not want to spend a lot of extra effort on making the
selection and participating in the design. Online vendors should
support their clients by providing automatically generated
recommendations and supporting customer collaboration.

In most cases personalization techniques are used for tailoring
information services to personal user needs. What used to be
possible in the corner shop, since the shopkeeper knew her customers
personally, will be extensively possible in the electronic realm
using customer profiles and predefined rules for personalized
services. With the use of electronic media, the advantages of mass
marketing can be used to strengthen personalized customer
communication and may lead to collaborative customization as a
powerful support mechanism in customer relationship management.

Communities combine the different needs in this process:

  * gathering customer profile information (for providing
     personalization)
  * gathering product meta information (for an enriched product
     catalog)
  * providing access to other customers for customer collaboration

Hence, communities and related information (gathered in and around
the communities) are important ingredients for customer support and
mass-customization.

For this mini-track we call for papers, which address (online)
communities and customer collaboration for mass-customization and
personalization. We concentrate on (online) customer communities and
on how the collaboration in these communities can be used to compile
powerful user profile information which (combined with product meta
information) can help in customizing/configuring products and services
online.

The discussion of communities and customer collaboration includes

  * direct collaboration of the customers in the community - e.g.
     co-development of products or direct recommendation
  * indirect communication/collaboration in the community through
     information exchange
  * indirect/automatic recommendation and personalization based on
     user profiles acquired from or through the community

Profile acquisition and automatic personalization plays an important
role in these applications but is not the only issue - direct
collaboration (with mediation through technology) is equally important.

Possible topics for papers include but are not limited to the
following:

  1. Case studies of customer collaboration (both with electronic
      platforms and offline)
  2. Customer communities, transaction-oriented Virtual Communities and
      Customer Innovation Communities
  3. Business models for customer collaboration
  4. Acquisition of customer profiles
  5. Collaborative filtering for supporting customers
  6. Interface, product and service design for customer collaboration
  7. Social, political and economic impact of customer collaboration
  8. Service architecture and community dynamics
  9. Legal aspects of acquiring and storing customer profiles

The mini-track is placed in the context of a whole series of mini-tracks
on Virtual Communities at The Americas Conference on Information Systems
(AMCIS) and at The Hawaiian International Conference on System Sciences
(HICSS) in recent years. See
http://www.e-business.fhbb.ch/eb/afe.nsf/pages_e/amcis and
http://www.e-business.fhbb.ch/eb/afe.nsf/pages_e/hicss for more
information on the recent mini-tracks.


Important Dates:

Submission of Full Paper or Extended Abstract: March 1, 2003
Notification of Acceptance:                    May 1, 2003
Camera-Ready Copy:                             August 1, 2003


Submission Instructions:

A 1500 word extended abstract or a full paper in English should be
submitted by March 1, 2003 to the Mini-track Chairs (see contact
information below). Authors will be notified of acceptance of their
abstracts by May 1, 2003. Final manuscripts must be received by
August 1, 2003. Also see the general submission information for
MCPC2003 at http://www.mcpc2003.com/submission.htm


More information:

http://www11.in.tum.de/conferences/mcpc2003.html
http://www.mcpc2003.com/


Mini-track organizers and contact:

Michael Koch
[log in to unmask]
Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM)
Department of Informatics
Boltzmannstr. 3
D-85743 Garching, Germany
Tel +49-89-289-18690

Petra Schubert
[log in to unmask]
University of Applied Sciences (FHBB)
Institute for Business Economics (IAB)
Peter Merian-Strasse 86
CH-4002 Basel, Switzerland
Tel +41-61-279-1774

Munich organization committee:
Rosmary Stegmann ([log in to unmask]), Thomas Leckner
([log in to unmask]), Martin Lacher ([log in to unmask])


Program Committee

  * Liliana Ardissono, University of Turin, Italy
  * Uwe Borghoff, University of the Federal Armed Forces Munich, Germany
  * Walter Dettling, Universität of Applied Sciences Basel, Switzerland
  * Alexander Felfernig, University Klagenfurt, Austria
  * Mark Ginsburg, University of Arizona, USA
  * Martin Helander, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
  * Michael Koch, Technische Universität München, Informatics, Germany
  * Ulrike Lechner, Universität Bremen, Germany
  * Kathrin Möslein, Technische Universität München, Business School,
     Germany
  * Jenny Preece, University of Maryland Baltimore County, USA
  * Wolfgang Prinz, RWTH Aachen and Fraunhofer FIT, Germany
  * Johann Schlichter, Technische Universität München, Informatics,
     Germany
  * Petra Schubert, University of Applied Sciences Basel, Switzerland
  * Katarina Stanoevska, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland
  * Volker Wulf, University of Siegen and Fraunhofer FIT, Germany
  
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