Towards Effective Evaluation of Digital Community Information Systems

Abstract

Digital Community Information Systems (CIS) are increasing in both size and scale. These systems help people obtain community information (CI) for the myriad situations that arise in everyday life. As these systems migrate to the online environment, increasing complexities and scale provide the impetus for improvements in system design. System re-design, however, relies on the effective evaluation of digital CIS. Despite the plethora of evaluation frameworks from the systems, organizational, and information retrieval fields, minimal research has directly addressed the issue of digital CIS evaluation. Following a selective review of digital CIS and evaluation approaches, a layered evaluation framework is proposed to guide the evaluation of digital CIS.