this paper has been provided by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (General and Strategic grants), Bell Canada, the Ontario Ministry of Science and Technology, and the Information Technology Research Centre. We dedicate this chapter to science-fiction personage Judith Merril who net surfed for fifty years until her death in Sept., 1997.

This paper is dedicated to Philip J. Stone III, who first put me online in 1965.

As online groups grow in number and type, understanding lurking is becoming increasingly important. Recent reports indicate that lurkers make up over 90 % of online groups, yet little is known about them. This paper presents a demographic study of lurking in email-based discussion lists (DLs) with an emphasis on health and software-support DLs. Four primary questions are examined. One, how prevalent is lurking, and do health and software-support DLs differ? Two, how do lurking levels vary as the definition is broadened from zero posts in 12 weeks to 3 or fewer posts in 12 weeks? Three, is there a relationship between lurking and the size of the DL, and four, is there a relationship between lurking and traffic level? When lurking is defined as no posts, the mean lurking level for all DLs is lower than the reported 90%. Health-support DLs have on average significantly fewer lurkers (46%) than software-support DLs (82%). Lurking varies widely ranging from 0 to 99%. The relationships between lurking, group size and traffic are also examined.

Chat programs and instant messaging services are increasingly popular among Internet users. However, basic issues with the interfaces and data structures of most forms of chat limit their utility for use in formal interactions (like group meetings) and decision-making tasks. In this paper, we discuss Threaded Text Chat, a program designed to address some of the deficiencies of current chat programs. Standard forms of chat introduce ambiguity into interaction in a number of ways, most profoundly by rupturing connections between turns and replies. Threaded Chat presents a solution to this problem by supporting the basic turn-taking structure of human conversation. While the solution introduces interface design challenges of its own, usability studies show that users ’ patterns of interaction in Threaded Chat are equally effective, but different (and possibly more efficient) than standard chat programs.

this paper examines these relationships in more detail, and asks whether contributions, perceived benefits, and the relationships among them were different for owners of the lists (formal leaders), active posters, and lurkers of the groups, and for nonwork-related and work related groups. To test our hypotheses, we conducted repeated measures ANOVAs with respondent role (owner or other member) and group type (non-work or work-related) as fixed effects, and group size and content volume as covariates. Building 18 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 1 . T o t a l T i m e 1 . 0 0 2. Infrastructure Maintenance . 6 8 * * 1 . 0 0 3. Social Control .29** .28** 1.00 4. Social Encouragement .42** .29** .47** 1.00 5. External Promotion .31** .33** .29** .32** 1.00 6. Content Provision .87** .65** .29** .36** .28** 1.00 7. Audience Engagement .39** .11* .12* .16** .06 . 24** 1.00 9. Information Benefits .16** .05 -.10 .13* .00 .06 .15** .24** 1.00 10. Social Benefits .33** .17** .20** .35** .22** .28** .17** .30** .30** 1.00 11. Altruistic Benefits .28** .23** .10 .34** .15** .26** .13* .32** .28** .49** 1.00 12. Work-Related Group -.06 .07 -.09 .04 -.02 -.03 -.02 .28** .08 -.12* .09 1.00 13. Log (Group Size) -.01 -.11 -.02 .02 -.09 -.11* .10 .07 .20** -.08 -.05 .17** 1.00 14. Log (Message Volume + .01) .19** -.04 .08 .13* -.03 .08 .13* .06 .21** .08 .09 -.18** .52** 1.00 15. # of Members Known Outside the Group .14** .20** .06 .08 .07 .31** -.01 .06 -.06 .02 .12* .05 -.07 .01 Pairwise Ns range from 325 to 385 * p <= 0.05; ** p <= 0.01 Table 3: Correlations among measures 19 RESULTS A premise of this research is that community building requires significant expenditures of time and effort on the part of members. The descriptive analysis presented below shows that members reported inv...

The goal of the proposed work is to develop a theory of design for building on-line social environments. The underlying hypothesis is that in order to foster the development of virtual communities and cultures, the environment must provide the means to communicate social cues and information: the participants must be able to perceive the patterns of activity and affiliation that reveal the structure of a community and to have a fluid and subtle vocabulary for conveying cultural information. The theoretical foundation for the research is drawn from traditional studies of society and culture and from observations of contemporary on-line systems. Starting with an analysis of the fundamental differences between real and virtual societies - most notably, the presence and absence of the body - the first section examines the ways social cues are communicated in the real world, discusses the limits imposed on online communities due to their mediated and bodiless nature, and explores directions...

this report is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation #IIS-0083075, #ITR-0205679 and #ITR-0205724. No endorsement implied. Mark Ackerman at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor; Les Gasser at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; John Noll at the Santa Clara University; Chris Jensen, Mark Bergman, and Xiaobin Li at the UCI Institute for Software Research, and also Julia Watson at The Ohio State University are collaborators on the research project that produced this chapter. 1 1

Abstract: New computer applications, such as the infamous "Napster " system enable the sharing of music over the Internet, with limited communication around this sharing activity This paper discusses the use and opportunities for these music sharing technologies using interviews with users of both conventional and new music sharing technologies. The data show that music sharing is a practice that is richly linked with other social activities New music is often discovered through friends, by listening to music together, or in the form of compilation tapes. In these environments, sharing music is a natural activity. With music sharing over the Internet, however, much of this social context is removed This suggests opportunities to turn music sharing into a more collaborative and community-related activity These opportunities are explored with the "Music Buddy", a system for browsing others' music collections without infringing the copyright of artists.

Abstract not found

When computer networks link people as well as machines, they become social networks. Social network analysis provides a useful approach to moving beyond the concept of “group ” in studying virtual communities and computer supported cooperative work and telework. Such computer supported social networks (CSSNS) sustain strong, inter-mediate and weak ties that provide information and social support in both specialized and broadly-based relation-ships. They foster informal workplace communities that are usually partial and narrowly-focused, although some do become encompassing and broadly-based. CSSNS connect workers within and between organizations who often are physically dispersed. The nature of the medium both constrains and facilitates management control. Although many relationships function offline as well as online, CSSNS have developed their own norms and structures. They have strong societal implications, foster-ing situations that combine global connectivity, the fragmentation of solidarities and the de-emphasis of local organization, and the importance of home bases. KEYWORDS computer supported cooperative work, informal relation-ships, telework, electronic mail, social networks COMPUTER SUPPORTED SOCIAL NETWORKS When a computer network connects people, it is a social network. Just as a computer network is a set of machines connected by a set of cables, a social network is a set of people (or organizations or other social entities) connected by a set of socially-meaningful relationships. Why do computer scientists talk about “groupware ” when a computer network supports all forms of social networks and not only groups? A group is only a special form of social network, one which is densely-knit (most nodes are directly connected with each other) and tightly-bounded (most links stay within the network rather than connecting Permission to make digitrd/trard copies of all or part of this material for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or diwibmed for profit or commercial advantage, the copyright notice, the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is