Editorial

Abstract

We begin this issue with a paper by Thomas Chesney, Iain Coyne, Brian Logan and Neil Madden who explore a new issue to the ISJ, that of griefing in online communities. Griefing is defined as unacceptable, persistent behaviour which is typically targeted at inexperienced residents by those with more knowledge of the virtual world. Virtual worlds are increasingly being used for social and commercial interaction, in addition to their original use for game playing. This paper studies negative behaviour, or ‘griefing’, inside one virtual world (Linden Lab's Second Life) through a cross-disciplinary approach with a quantitative and qualitative methodology, but using a series of observations and focus groups with users in particular. Data were collected to identify griefing behaviours and their impact, examine why griefing happens and who the likely targets and perpetrators are, and suggest strategies for coping with it. Although intolerance, harassment, assault, disclosure, indecency and disturbing the peace are all against the rules of Second Life, they do occur in such communities. Further, it is not a trivial issue: cyberbullying has apparently led to suicides. The findings show that griefing behaviour is common. Community and individual coping strategies are identified by the authors and discussed. One potential strategy for coping with griefing is for the community of users to use the controls available to them (land controls for instance) to collectively deal with troublesome avatars. The paper of Hilary Berger and Paul Beynon-Davies reports on an empirical study of a rapid application development (RAD) project in a large UK public sector organisation. The research is based on 121 interviews providing the reader with a rare in-depth case study of the use of RAD in large and complex projects, RAD being more frequently evidenced in smaller development projects. The case demonstrates problems experienced with the application of iterative development principles, particularly surrounding the conduct of stakeholder involvement within joint design in such an organization, but over time these problems were overcome. The evidence from this case leads the authors to question the established wisdom in relation to the adoption of information systems development methodologies, in particular the interviews suggest that traditional linear development in this situation would not have worked. On the contrary, the case study suggests that the relationship between the methodology and the development environment is a dynamic one, subject to mutual influence and change. This is a particularly striking conclusion as the context is a large and somewhat bureaucratic organization. The paper of Yinglei Wang and Nicole Haggerty concerns the challenges associated with managing knowledge in distributed work contexts. Clearly knowledge management, including that in the virtual world, is an important research topic and yet the authors suggest that knowledge transfer in these contexts has been little researched. The authors argue that people need particular personality capabilities and skills for virtual work and that these, rather than technological or social factors, are a key contributor to effective knowledge transfer. The paper contributes some suggestions as to what these capabilities and skills might look like. In their conceptual research, drawing on self-efficacy theory, channel expansion theory, media naturalness theory and theories about social skill in virtual settings to present the mechanisms to develop virtual competence, the authors develop a theoretical model of individual virtual competence and describe its role in the communication process which underpins effective knowledge transfer in virtual settings. Additionally, they consider the antecedent role that prior experience in virtual activity plays in aiding workers to develop virtual competence which in turn engenders effective knowledge transfer.