Traditional activities change in surprising ways when computermediated communication becomes a component of the activity system. In this descriptive study, we leverage two perspectives on social activity to understand the experiences of individuals who became active collaborators in Wikipedia, a prolific, cooperatively-authored online encyclopedia. Legitimate peripheral participation provides a lens for understanding participation in a community as an adaptable process that evolves over time. We use ideas from activity theory as a framework to describe our results. Finally, we describe how activity on the Wikipedia stands in striking contrast to traditional publishing and suggests a new paradigm for collaborative systems.

carl.gutwin, reagan.penner, kevin.schneider @ usask.ca Open-source software development projects are almost always collaborative and distributed. Despite the difficulties imposed by distance, these projects have managed to produce large, complex, and successful systems. However, there is still little known about how open-source teams manage their collaboration. In this paper we look at one aspect of this issue: how distributed developers maintain group awareness. We interviewed developers, read project communication, and looked at project artifacts from three successful open source projects. We found that distributed developers do need to maintain awareness of one another, and that they maintain both a general awareness of the entire team and more detailed knowledge of people that they plan to work with. Although there are several sources of information, this awareness is maintained primarily through text-based communication (mailing lists and chat systems). These textual channels have several characteristics that help to support the maintenance of awareness, as long as developers are committed to reading the lists and to making their project communication public.

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Turnover in online communities is very high, with most people who initially post a message to an online community never contributing again. In this paper, we test whether the responses that newcomers receive to their first posts influence the extent to which they continue to participate. The data come from initial posts made by 2,777 newcomers to six public newsgroups. We coded the content and valence of the initial post and its first response, if it received one, to see if these factors influenced newcomers' likelihood of posting again. Approximately 61% of newcomers received a reply to their initial post, and those who got a reply were 12% more likely to post to the community again; their probability of posting again increased from 44% to 56%. They were more likely to receive a response if the y asked a question or wrote a longer post. Surprisingly, the quality of the response they received---its emotional tone and whether it answered a newcomer's question---did not influence the likelihood of the newcomer's posting again.

The aim of this research is to develop an in-depth understanding of the dynamics of online group interaction and the relationship between the participation in an online community and an individual’s off-line life. The 21 /2-year study of a thriving online health support community (Bob’s ACL WWWBoard) used a broad fieldwork approach, guided by the ethnographic research techniques of observation, interviewing, and archival research in combination with analysis of the group’s dynamics during a one-week period. Research tools from the social sciences were used to develop a thick, rich description of the group. The significant findings of this study include: dependable and reliable technology is more important than state-of-the-art technology in this community; strong community development exists despite little differentiation of the community space provided by the software; members reported that participation in the community positively influenced their offline lives; strong group norms of support and reciprocity made externally-driven governance unnecessary; tools used to assess group dynamics in face-to-face groups provide meaningful information about online group dynamics; and, membership patterns in the community and strong subgroups actively contributed to the community’s stability and vitality.

Online communities (OCs) are seen as important stimulus to electronic business. However, surprisingly little is known about how the communication activity of their users develops and changes over time. A longitudinal study bears the potential to better elaborate the enabling and inhibiting factors of the users' communication activity in OCs. To explore these phenomena, we aim to develop a conceptual framework that serves as a foundation to guide an explorative data analysis of real OCs. The notions of common ground, information overload, interactivity and social loafing will be used to explain the communication activity of the users in online communities. The empirically explored framework will help organizations to support the development of OCs and utilize them in an economically successful way.

Information Systems at the University

IBM Community Tools (ICT) is a synchronous broadcast messaging system in use by a very large, globally distributed organization. ICT is interesting for a number of reasons, including its scale of use (thousands of users per day), its usage model of employing large scale broadcast to strangers to initiate small group interactions, and the fact that it is a synchronous system used across multiple time zones. In this paper we characterize the use of ICT in its context, examine the activities for which it is used, the motivations of its users, and the values they derive from it. We also explore problems with the system, and look at the social and technical ways in which users deal with them.

The Internet is widely valued for distributing control over information to a lateral network of individuals, but it is not clear how these networks can most effectively organize themselves. This paper describes the distributed networks of volunteers that emerged online following Hurricane Katrina. Online communities responded to the disaster by facilitating the distribution of donated goods from ordinary people directly to hurricane survivors. These “connected giving ” groups faced several challenges: establishing authority within the group, providing relevant information, developing trust in one another, and sustaining the group over time. Two forms of computer-mediated connected giving were observed: small blog communities and large forums. Small blog communities used a centralized authority structure that was more immediately successful in managing information and developing trust, but over time, blog communities were difficult to sustain. Larger and more decentralized forums had greater difficulties focusing the community’s communication and developing trust but sustained themselves over a long period of time.

Many small online communities would benefit from increased diversity or activity in their membership. Some communities run the risk of dying out due to lack of participation. Others struggle to achieve the critical mass necessary for diverse and engaging conversation. But what tools are available to these communities to increase participation? Our goal in this research was to spark contributions to the movielens.org discussion forum, where only 2 % of the members write posts. We developed personalized invitations, messages designed to entice users to visit or contribute to the forum. In two field experiments, we ask (1) if personalized invitations increase activity in a discussion forum, (2) how the choice of algorithm for intelligently choosing content to emphasize in the invitation affects participation, and (3) how the suggestion made to the user affects their willingness to act. We find that invitations lead to increased participation, as measured by levels of reading and posting. More surprisingly, we find that invitations emphasizing the social nature of the discussion forum are effective, while invitations emphasizing non-social aspects of the discussion are less so. ACM Classification: H.4.3 Communications Applications: