The two page abstract for the poster I presented at the 2013 iConference is now available online. You can also view the poster image here.

The sharing economy describes an economic model where people sell, share, or barter their skills or owned assets directly to others. This economy is facilitated primarily by websites that act as hubs for the visibility and transactions of local assets. Yochai Benkler notes that such peer-to-peer transactions are mediated not by market prices or organizational hierarches, but by normative frameworks. How the normative frameworks are produced and perpetuated by transacting parties on the websites has yet to be studied by scholars. This paper proposes a practice perspective as a theoretical framework and Sense-Making as a method to explore how users interact with each other on the websites so as to produce and sustain the normative frameworks critical to the success of the sharing economy.