Requirements for community support systems - modularization,integration and ubiquitous user interfaces

Community support platforms are gaining more and more interest in areas ranging from leisure support and customer support in electronic commerce to knowledge management in enterprises. However, current solutions usually are built as proprietary systems or as add-ons to systems designed for other purposes. The platforms are usually not very customizable and interoperable and are not utilizing the full potential of the community support idea. We have introduced community platforms in several domains and have derived some requirements in these projects. These requirements are mainly related to different aspects of usability. In this paper we present the requirements and motivate an architecture for community support systems designed to fulfil these requirements.