Browsing by Subject "online communities"
- Text DocumentAutomated Discovery of Social Networks in Text-Based Online Communities(Proceedings of the 2009 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2009) Gruzd, AnatoliyAs a way to gain greater insights into the operation of online communities, this dissertation applies automated text mining techniques to text-based communication to identify, describe and evaluate underlying social networks among online community members. The main thrust of the study is to find a way to use computers to discover social ties that form between community members just from the digital footprints left behind in their online forum postings automatically. As part of this work, a web-based system for content and network analysis called the Internet Community Text Analyzer (ICTA) is being developed. A prototype of ICTA is available at http://textanalytics.net.
- Conference PaperCharacterizations of Online Harassment: Comparing Policies Across Social Media Platforms(Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2016) Pater, Jessica A.; Kim, Moon K.; Mynatt, Elizabeth D.; Fiesler, CaseyHarassment in online spaces is increasingly part of public debate and concern. Pervasive problems like cyberbullying, hate speech, and the glorification of self-harm have highlighted the breadth and depth of harassment taking place online. In this study we conduct a content analysis of the governing policies for fifteen social media platforms as they relate to harassment (of oneself and/or of community members) and other associated behaviors. We find that there is a striking inconsistency in how platform-specific policies depict harassment. Additionally, how these policies prescribe responses to harassment vary from mild censuring to the involvement of law enforcement. Finally, based on our analysis and findings, we discuss the potential for harnessing the power of the online communities to create norms around problematic behaviors.
- Journal ArticleCommunication Spaces(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 17, 2008) Healey, Patrick G. T.; White, Graham; Eshghi, Arash; Reeves, Ahmad J.; Light, AnnConcepts of space are fundamental to our understanding of human action and interaction. The common sense concept of uniform, metric, physical space is inadequate for design. It fails to capture features of social norms and practices that can be critical to the success of a technology. The concept of ‘place’ addresses these limitations by taking account of the different ways a space may be understood and used. This paper argues for the importance of a third concept: communication space. Motivated by Heidegger’s discussion of ‘being-with’ this concept addresses differences in interpersonal ‘closeness’ or mutual-involvement that are a constitutive feature of human interaction. We apply the concepts of space, place and communication space to the analysis of a corpus of interactions from an online community, ‘Walford’, which has a rich communicative ecology. A novel measure of sequential integration of conversational turns is proposed as an index of mutal-involvement. We demonstrate systematic differences in mutual-involvement that cannot be accounted for in terms of space or place and conclude that a concept of communication space is needed to address the organisation of human encounters in this community.
- Text DocumentEncouraging collective intelligence for the common good: how do we integrate the disparate pieces?(Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Communities and Technologies, 2015) Schuler, Douglas; De Cindio, Fiorella; De Liddo, Anna; Avram, Gabriela; De Cindio, Fiorella; Pipek, VolkmarLargely due to the Internet and the increase in digital network communications worldwide, researchers, community members, activists, and many others are exploring new ways of empowering citizens with systems that promote Collective Intelligence for the Common Good (CI4CG). We define CI4CG as a distinctive type of collective intelligence, which emerges in civic contexts; it is aimed at generating societal good; improving civic engagement; enabling democratic decision making and deliberation; and producing, collectively built and owned, transformative solutions to complex societal challenges. In this workshop we will survey a variety of online tools and discuss what aspects of CI4CG they are intended to address and how they would be used by communities. An important part of the work will be identifying possible approaches towards integrating the tools technologically and socially. We will try to identify frameworks and mechanisms that various systems could leverage.
- Conference PaperExploring Ethics and Obligations for Studying Digital Communities(Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2016) Fiesler, Casey; Wisniewski, Pamela; Pater, Jessica; Andalibi, NazaninMany of the most prominent and unanswered ethical questions within HCI and social computing involve our ethical obligation to the communities that we study. Some of these questions fall under the purview of more traditional human subjects research ethics, but others hinge on when, for example, studies of public data trigger similar obligations. Basic rules to do no harm" are complicated in digital communities by issues of consent and privacy, and ethics review boards are struggling to keep up even as research communities are similarly struggling to form appropriate norms. The goals of this workshop are to continue seeding conversations about research ethics within the SIGCHI community, to work towards norm setting, and in the meantime, to collectively help community members make good ethical decisions about research into sociotechnical systems and digital communities."
- Conference PaperGuess What! You're the First to See This Event: Increasing Contribution to Online Production Communities(Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2016) Jackson, Corey Brian; Crowston, Kevin; Mugar, Gabriel; Østerlund, CarstenIn this paper, we describe the results of an online field experiment examining the impacts of messaging about task novelty on the volume of volunteers' contributions to an online citizen science project. Encouraging volunteers to provide a little more content as they work is an attractive strategy to increase the community's output. Prior research found that an important motivation for participation in online citizen science is the wonder of being the first person to observe a particular image. To appeal to this motivation, a pop-up message was added to an online citizen science project that alerted volunteers when they were the first to annotate a particular image. Our analysis reveals that new volunteers who saw these messages increased the volume of annotations they contributed. The results of our study suggest an additional strategy to increase the amount of work volunteers contribute to online communities and citizen science projects specifically.
- Conference Paper"I Am Not a Lawyer": Copyright Q&A in Online Creative Communities(Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2014) Fiesler, Casey; Feuston, Jessica; Bruckman, Amy S.Once referred to by the Supreme Court as the metaphysics" of law, many parts of copyright policy are historically confusing. Therefore, it isn't surprising that in communities where amateur content creators work within a legal gray area, copyright is a frequent topic of conversation. Here, people with often little knowledge of the letter of the law are asking and answering complex legal questions in the context of their creative activities. Working from a content analysis of public forum conversations in eight different online communities, we have examined these questions and answers more closely. By studying these interactions, what can we learn about how people engage with the law and how non-expert advice affects behavior and knowledge?"
- Conference PaperIdentity and User Behavior in Online Communities(Companion Proceedings of the 2020 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2020) Guo, ChengIn online communities, people share and discuss information at all levels of topic sensitivity. Identity policies within these communities range from real names to anonymity. The amount of user engagement, the quality of the information, disinformation behavior (e.g., trolling) may differ under different types of identity, which is currently unclear. Most of these online communities have a mechanism of content moderation. The relationship between identity and moderation is also unclear. Finally, yet little is known about how and why people make decisions of self-disclosure in online communities. My dissertation research aims to deepen our understanding of identity and user behavior in online communities. My research will benefit privacy researchers, online social network designers, policymakers, and researchers in the field of Human-Computer Interaction who study online identity and social media.
- Conference PaperInvestigating Collaboration Within Online Communities: Software Development vs. Artistic Creation(Proceedings of the 2018 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2018) Iaffaldano, GiuseppeOnline creative communities have been able to develop large, open source software (OSS) projects like Linux and Firefox throughout the successful collaborations carried out over the Internet. These communities have also expanded to creative arts domains such as animation, video games, and music. Despite their growing popularity, the factors that lead to successful collaborations in these communities are not entirely understood. In the following, I describe my Ph.D. research project aimed at improving communication, collaboration, and retention in creative arts communities, starting from the experience gained from the literature about OSS communities.
- Journal ArticleJournalists as Crowdsourcerers: Responding to Crisis by Reporting with a Crowd(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 23, No. 4-6, 41974) Dailey, Dharma; Starbird, KateWidespread adoption of new information communication technologies (ICTs) is disrupting traditional models of news production and distribution. In this rapidly changing media landscape, the role of the journalist is evolving. Our research examines how professional journalists within a rural community impacted by Hurricane Irene successfully negotiated a new role for themselves, transforming their journalistic practice to serve in a new capacity as leaders of an online volunteer community. We describe an emergent organization of media professionals, citizen journalists, online volunteers, and collaborating journalistic institutions that provided real-time event coverage. In this rural context, where communications infrastructure is relatively uneven, this ad hoc effort bridged gaps in ICT infrastructure to unite its audience. In this paper, we introduce a new perspective for characterizing these information-sharing activities: the “human powered mesh network” extends the concept of a mesh network to include human actors in the movement of information. Our analysis shows how journalists played a key role in this network, and facilitated the movement of information to those who needed it. These findings also note a contrast between how HCI researchers are designing crowdsourcing platforms for news production and how crowdsourcing efforts are forming during disaster events, suggesting an alternative approach to designing for emergent collaborations in this context.
- Journal ArticleLatent Users in an Online User-Generated Content Community(Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 23, No. 1, 41671) Velasquez, Alcides; Wash, Rick; Lampe, Cliff; Bjornrud, TorOnline communities depend on the persistent contributions of heterogeneous users with diverse motivations and ways of participating. As these online communities exist over time, it is possible that users change the way in which they contribute to the site. Through interviews with 31 long-term members of a user-generated content community who have decreased their participation on the site, we examined the meaning that these users gave to their contribution and how their new participation patterns related to their initial motivations. We complement the reader-to-leader framework (Preece and Shneiderman: AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction , vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 13–32, 2009 ) by propounding the concept of latent user to understand decreasing content contribution and user life-cycles in online communities. We showed that even though latent users decrease their content contribution, their participation becomes more selective and remained consistent with initial motivations to participate.
- Text DocumentNewcomer Integration and Learning in Technical Support Communities for Open Source Software(Proceedings of the 2012 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2012) Singh, VandanaIn this paper we present results of an NSF funded project on exploring and understanding cyber learning that happens in online open source software (OSS) communities for technical support. We look across multiple OSS support communities (Firefox, Java, and Koha) to understand the behavior of newcomers in these communities, the role that the community response plays in their continued participation and newcomer best practices. We found that newcomers are not a homogenous group and majority of them display model" behavior. We also found out that community response is critical for continued participation of newcomers. In our dataset, almost all non returning newcomers can be attributed to receiving no reply or a condescending reply from the community. We found that one third of newcomers' transition into a role of help givers in the community and demonstrate evidence of learning. We also highlight best practices for newcomers to be successful in these online communities."
- Text DocumentOpen Innovation and the Solver Community(Proceedings of the 2009 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2009) Cardoso, Margarida; Ramos, IsabelThis paper introduces a doctoral research on open innovation solver's behavior and group factors inducing it. The research is now finishing its first year and exploratory strategies are developed close to open innovation online communities, to prepare a systematic methodological approach.Research seeks to understand how solver's patterns of communication and group behavior influence their participation in an open innovation community, through collaborative IT platforms - and how it weights on their innovation production. A second question is about critical factors that influence solvers' participation, due to the present global economical crisis. By designing a model of the solver's group of belonging characteristics and reflecting that on a collaborative platform's functionalities, the project intends to present some propositions to ease participation in crowdsourcing innovation processes - through an online platform being designed and developed at University of Minho.
- Conference PaperQuality Hackathon: Evaluating the Products of Online Co-Production Systems(Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2014) Wiggins, Andrea; Gurzick, David; Goggins, Sean; Butler, BrianThis full-day workshop focuses on building Big Social Data research competencies for scholars interested in issues of contribution quality and contributor performance in online co-production systems that generate value through contributions by volunteers. The workshop is designed to engage discussion and promote co-working through a hackathon format to stimulate productive conversation and learning, using shared data sets to provide a common focus for participants to engage questions of contribution quality and contributor performance with multiple disciplinary, theoretical, and analytical backgrounds.
- Conference PaperScaffolded Help for Learning: How Experts Collaboratively Support Newcomer Participation in Online Communities(Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Communities and Technologies, 2017) Johri, Aditya; Yang, Seungwon; Lewkowicz, Myriam; Rohde, Markus; Mulder, Ingrid; Schuler, DouglasOnline communities, often in the form of discussion forums, encapsulate the very notion of "doing good with technology" by serving as a conduit for help-seeking and problem-solving by users who volunteer their time and effort. One form of helping is assisting others with learning new content, an under-examined topic within the context of online communities, and in this paper we present a study investigating how online discussion forums go beyond informational support and guide newcomers' learning. We analyzed a forum dedicated to helping newcomers learn the programming language Java™. Using an empirical approach that combined analysis of forum data with interviews with expert we found that experts consciously and collaboratively scaffolded newcomers' learning by creating shared understanding, providing ongoing diagnosis, and fading their help over time. Multiple resources were leveraged for scaffolding and learners often received personalized instruction through collaborative contributions of multiple experts on the forum.
- Conference PaperSocial Media for Sensitive Disclosures and Social Support: The Case of Miscarriage(Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2016) Andalibi, NazaninI study self-disclosure and investigate ways in which social computing systems can be designed to allow people to disclose negatively-perceived or stigmatized experiences and find support in their social networks. My prior work has given me insight about online disclosures of depression and sexual abuse, the role of anonymity in support seeking, and the ways that people respond to such disclosures. In my dissertation I will use miscarriage as a context to investigate online disclosure and response practices around stigmatized and traumatizing topics with the goal of improving both theory and social media design practices.
- Text DocumentThe role of community in exercise: cross-cultural study of online exercise diary users(Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Communities and Technologies - C&T '13, 2013) Malinen, Sanna; Nurkka, PiiaThis study investigates users of a newly launched website aimed at tracking exercise activities. The data was collected through an online questionnaire with 282 respondents. Three nationalities, Spanish, Germans and Americans, were compared, and the results show that their relation to community aspects of the service was significantly different. The Spanish showed most interest in collaboration and creation of new contacts, whereas Germans were the least interested in these activities. The finding may be explained by the differences of these national cultures along the individualism-collectivism dimension of Hofstede's cultural theory. Across the nationalities, the users were foremost motivated by using the website for promoting their individual goals in exercise.
- Conference PaperTowards Professionalization in an Online Community of Emerging Occupation: Discourses among UX Practitioners(Proceedings of the 2018 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2018) Kou, Yubo; Gray, Colin M.The occupational landscape of the digital economy is rapidly changing, resulting in the emergence of multidisciplinary occupations. Emerging occupations such as user experience (UX) design are in high demand, but these occupations lack clear boundaries and have yet to develop into a profession with a specified, coherent body of knowledge. While traditional occupations such as medicine and law successfully claimed their professional jurisdiction and high social power and status long before the Internet, how do these emerging occupations work towards professionalization, particularly as they are increasingly supported by and through online communities? In this paper, we investigate an online UX community to understand how UX practitioners specify their occupational knowledge and professional boundaries. Using this case as an example and provocation, we discuss how online communities support the emergence of new occupations and may play an indispensable role in modern day patterns of professionalization.
- Text DocumentA View from Mount Olympus: The Impact of Activity Tracking Tools on the Character and Practice of Moderation(Proceedings of the 2009 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2009) Gurzick, David; White, Kevin F.; Lutters, Wayne G.; Boot, LeeModeration within online communities is critical. Though many guidelines are available that describe the goals of successful moderation, these often minimize the complex interplay that exists between tools and practices of moderators. This study investigates the role of moderation through the lens of the moderators in a nascent online community for adolescents. Based on an analysis of their activities, three classes of emergent behavior were uncovered when exploring how the available tools impacted the way moderator work was performed. The findings reveal a need for design considerations that take into account the appropriateness of match between the tools and work processes from a moderator perspective.
- Conference PaperWhen Social Norms Fail(Companion Proceedings of the 2020 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2020) Dym, Brianna; Fiesler, CaseyWithin online communities, social norms that both set expectations for and regulate behavior can be critical to the overall welfare of the community--particularly in the context of the privacy and safety of its members. For communities where the cost of regulatory failure can be high, it is important to understand both the conditions under which norms might be effective, and when they might fail. As a case study, we consider transformative fandom, a creative community dedicated to reimagining existing media in subversive ways. Due to the vulnerability of many members, this community has strong, longstanding norms to keep its members safe. Through an interview study with 25 fandom participants, we investigate this complex array of implicit norms that have been largely effective over time, but have also begun to break down. Catalysts for these breakdowns include value tensions between sub-communities and an increasing presence of outsiders, though most prominently, we identify a disconnect between the norms the community needs to support and the design of the platforms they occupy.