Knowledge Networks, Emerging Social Media Technologies and Web2.0 Platforms

The cultural heritage of a town often remains hidden from potential visitors. This chapter shows how the theory of knowledge ecosystems can build networks for eliciting and sharing place-making narratives. It applies these theories in a case study where a new feature in the WhatsApp smartphone app is used to develop slow tourism for a destination in Normandy, France. For the tourism development team, the theories of story, plot and novelistic discourse are explored through an illustrative and reusable example for place-making creatives. Deliberately created knowledge ecosystems provide a way forward in tourism development for eliciting, creating and formulating knowledge into a transferrable then usable form; the current literature reaches two key conclusions to consider when establishing and managing a knowledge ecosystem, these are openness, which is connected with a shared or common purpose for the development project, and the relationship between good governance and enhanced sense of community. In this project, these two considerations were centred around the creation of reusable components of travel narrative as digital assets to form a common purpose for the stakeholders.