Understanding and Building Member-Maintained Communities.

Daniel Cosley (Cornell University)

Wednesday February 13, 2008
10:00 a.m. - SENSQ 5317

Refreshments at 9:30 a.m.

Hosted by Janyce Wiebe

Abstract

The rise of social web applications and online community provides computer scientists and social scientists alike to research and improve the technologies that support these communities. In this talk, we will focus on member-maintained communities: systems where many people participate in activities such as moderating contributions and building public goods like Wikipedia. These systems often capture rich traces of activity, allowing us to study the impact of algorithms, social structures, and interfaces on people's behavior. In particular, we will use MovieLens and Wikipedia to discuss three interesting questions that inform the design of these communities:

 
• How can we use personalization algorithms to encourage people to do work for the community?
•  Would online public goods be higher quality if people reviewed contributions before they went live?
• Which is a better predictor of your future behavior: what you do, or who you know?

We will talk about why these questions are hard to answer, come to tentative answers anyways, and suggest what we might do to better answer them in the future. 

Biography of speaker

Dan Cosley is a visiting assistant professor at Cornell University, teaching courses in human-computer interaction. His primary interest is helping groups make sense and use of information. His recent work focuses on designing systems that encourage members to contribute more to shared community resources, combining social science theory, HCI design principles, and computational tools to motivate participation. He is also interested in the more general problem of how to apply theories of behavior to the design of systems in a way that helps future designers, theorists, and researchers use the results.