Self-Organizing Museum Visitor Communities: A Participatory Action Research Based Approach

This paper introduces a self-organizing museum visitor communities' formation exploiting their personal characteristics and social interactions, aiming at enhancing their visiting experience based on a participatory action research (PAR) process. Initially, visitors' (a) interest and social ties, (b) expertise and willingness for participation in communities and (c) physical ties, are captured towards formulating their communities, and selecting the facilitator of each community. The latter will lead the PAR process, the outcome of which will be adopted by the members of each community. A museum touring framework is proposed towards maximizing visitors' perceived Quality of Experience (QoE), while three different community formation alternatives are studied and evaluated.