Abstract. Open Source Software (OSS) development is often characterized as a fundamentally new way to develop software. Past analyses and discussions, however, have treated OSS projects and their organization mostly as a static phenomenon. Consequently, we do not know how these communities of software developers are sustained and reproduced over time through the progressive integration of new members. To shed light on this issue I report on my analyses of socialization in a particular OSS community. In particular, I document the relationships OSS newcomers develop over time with both the social and material aspects of a project. To do so, I combine two mutually informing activities: ethnography and the use of software specially designed to visualize and explore the interacting networks of human and material resources incorporated in the email and code databases of OSS. Socialization in this community is analyzed from two perspectives: as an individual learning process and as a political process. From these analyses it appears that successful participants progressively construct identities as software craftsmen, and that this process is punctuated by specific rites of passage. Successful participants also understand the political nature of software development and progressively enroll a network of human and material allies to support their efforts. I conclude by discussing how these results could inform the design of software to support socialization in OSS projects, as well as practical implications for the future of these projects.

Approaches This brings us to the question of how social cues might best be portrayed in a digital system. We see three design approaches to answering this question: the realist, the mimetic, and the abstract. The realist approach involves trying to project social information from the physical domain into or through the digital domain. This work is exemplified in teleconferencing systems and media space research---see Finn, et al. (1997) for many examples.

How much history of the dialogue should a chat client include? Some chat clients have minimized the dialogue history to deploy the space for other purposes. A theory of conversational coordination suggests that stripping away history raises the cost of conversational grounding, creating problems for both writers and readers. To test this proposition and inform design, we conducted an experiment in which one person instructed another on how to solve a simple puzzle. Participants had chat clients that showed either a single conversational turn or six of them. Having the dialogue history helped collaborators communicate efficiently and led to faster and better task performance. The dialogue history was most useful when the puzzles were more linguistically complex and when instructors could not see the work area. We present evidence of participants adapting their discourse to partially compensate for deficits in the communication media. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.5.3 [Information

One of the most challenging problems facing builders and facilitators of community networks is to create and sustain social engagement among members. In this paper, we investigate the drivers of social engagement in a community network through the analysis of three data sources: activity logs, a member survey, and the content analysis of the conversation archives. We describe three important ways to encourage and support social engagement in online communities: through system design elements such as conversation channeling and event notification, by various selection criteria for community members, and through facilitation of specific kinds of discussion topics.

1 Situated Support for Learning: Storm’s Weekend with Rachael While much attention has been paid to the content of support for learning, less attention has been given to its context. This paper introduces the notion of “situated support, ” and argues that the identity of the source of support and the connectedness of that support to other elements of the learning environment are of primary importance. MOOSE Crossing is a text-based virtual reality environment (or “MUD”) designed to be a constructionist learning environment for children eight to thirteen years of age. A microanalysis is presented of the situated nature of support for learning on MOOSE Crossing over the course of one weekend where a twelve-year-old girl learned to write simple computer programs.

Technology is increasingly being incorporated into people’s day-to-day social relationships, particularly for people whose friendships occupy the center of their social lives. In the following paper we discuss a colocated social group's tendency to integrate planning and re-experiencing around social events with tools for persistent conversations. Through a questionnaire study we found that emails and mailing lists were used as much as phone conversations to plan social activities, and that said usage was positively correlated with measures of friendship satisfaction, sense of community, and percentage of time spent socializing. In response to our observations, we designed a sharing and communication application, Wallop, to enrich the co-located social group's planning and sharing around social events. Wallop provides both communication and social awareness tools, enabling users to build conversations in the context of shared content and browse their implicit social networks. Initial responses to Wallop from a focus group and limited deployment to test users have been positive.

Backchannel in digital conversations permits private communication visible only to the sender and receiver. Backchannel is multithreaded, substantial, and governed by many social conventions; it persists only if captured in users’ private logs. To better understand the backchannel’s function—and to predict ways backchannel may be affected by application design and attempts to capture it on a server-wide scale for research and analysis—we analyzed private transcripts of meetings and class sessions held in MUDs. We identified five backchannel categories: processoriented, content-oriented, participation-enabling, tangential, and independent backchannel. Software designers can use these results to understand how the backchannel should function in digital conversation applications. Making backchannel overtly available for study would require making its presence and content visible and its content persist, affecting the nature of the backchannel and raising social and ethical issues.

While many synchronous computer-mediated communication systems have failed to encourage users to make use of the expressive capabilities of their avatars, asynchronous systems may hold better chance. This paper reports on the design and user study of a message system that allows users to concatenate and annotate avatar animations and send them to peers. During three weeks, a group of 11 17-year-olds exchanged 222 animated messages in their everyday life environment. The interplay between text and animation allowed users to create significantly expressive messages. Many messages told micro-stories about fictitious and real events. Users identified with their avatars and were proud of their embodied representation. The content of messages deepened during the course of the study.

One of the most important roles played by technology is connecting people and mediating their communication with one another. Building technology that mediates conversation presents a number of challenging research and design questions. Apart from the fundamental issue of what exactly gets mediated, two of the more crucial questions are how the person being mediated interacts with the mediating layer and how the receiving person experiences the mediation. This thesis is concerned with both of these questions and proposes a theoretical framework of mediated conversation by means of automated avatars. This new approach relies on a model of face-to-face conversation, and derives an architecture for implementing these features through automation. First the thesis describes the process of face-to-face conversation and what nonverbal behaviors contribute to its success. It then presents a theoretical framework that explains how a text message can be automatically analyzed in terms of its communicative function based on discourse context, and how behaviors, shown to support those same functions in face-toface conversation, can then be automatically performed by a graphical avatar in synchrony with the message delivery. An architecture, Spark, built on this framework demonstrates the approach in an actual

In this paper we describe a software tool that allows investigators to make comparisons across different online forums and media by analyzing word counts in userspecified categories. Using a large sample of messages from a bipolar support chatroom, we demonstrate how this tool can be used to characterize the nature of the discourse and compare it to other media, to analyze relationships among different word categories, and to characterize changes in visitors ’ discourse over time. Future plans for adding functionality to the software and using external data for additional validation are also discussed. Author Keywords Online communities, computer-mediated communication, conversational analysis, empirical studies, computersupported cooperative work ACM Classification Keywords H5.3 Group and Organizational Interfaces: Computersupported cooperative work, synchronous interaction, evaluation/methodology