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.

Research into free and open source software development projects has so far largely focused on how the major tasks of software development are organized and motivated. But a complete project requires the execution of “mundane but necessary” tasks as well. In this paper, we explore how the mundane but necessary task of field support is organized in the case of Apache web server software, and why some project participants are motivated to provide this service gratis to others. We find that the Apache field support system functions effectively. We also find that, when we partition the help system into its component tasks, 98 % of the effort expended by information providers in fact returns direct learning benefits to those providers. This finding considerably reduces the puzzle of why information providers are willing to perform this task “for free. ” Implications are discussed.

This paper describes an experiment that compares behaviour in small groups when they carry out a task in a virtual environment (VE) and then continue the same task in a similar real-world environment. The purpose of the experiment was not to examine task performance, but to compare various aspects of the social relations between the group members in the two environments. Ten groups of 3 people each, who had never met before, met first in a shared VE and carried out a task that required the identification and solution of puzzles presented on pieces of paper stuck around the walls of a room. The puzzle involved identifying that the same-numbered words across all the pieces of paper formed a riddle or `saying'. The group continued this task for 15 minutes, and then stopped to answer a questionnaire. The group then reconvened in the real world, and continued the same task. The experiment also required one of the group members to continually monitor a particular one of the others in order t...

www.ifsm.umbc.edu/onlinecommunities Little attention has focused so far on evaluating the success of online communities. This paper starts to identify some key determinants of sociability and usability that help to determine their success. Determinants of sociability include obvious measures such as the number of participants in a community, the number of messages per unit of time, members ’ satisfaction, and some less obvious measures such as amount of reciprocity, the number of on-topic messages, trustworthiness and several others. Measures of usability include numbers of errors, productivity, user satisfaction and others. The list is not exhaustive but it is intended to provide a starting point for research on this important topic that will lead to develop of metrics. To avoid creating false impressions it is advisable to use several measures and to triangulate with qualitative data, particularly from ethnographic studies. 1

Web sites face difficult challenges in supporting successful communities. In this paper we discuss 2 operating web sites, identically designed but with different and distinct audiences. These sites collect user data from site activity and feed it back to the user community in novel ways. The sites are highly active and growing, and have fostered socially conscious, easily navigable and comprehensible on-line communities with little cost and maintenance. The practice of user data collection and re-purposing we describe works particularly well in highly contextual or information / resource-driven communities. These sites also integrate custom content authoring tools and track their use. The authoring tools were designed to quickly grow a specialized "knowledge base " of content created by users and published to a larger audience. In addition, a status system encourages the participation of users to contribute to this knowledge base, while simultaneously increasing social awareness and responsibility in areas of high user interaction. All user activity, communications, and feedback are tracked. Then data is compiled and reincorporated into scalable solutions for better navigability, content filtering, and presentation of contents to a larger audience. This practice creates a uniquely high quality of interaction within web communities.

This study is part of an ongoing comparative study of various types of open software communities including both free and open source software projects. This study examines how the organizational cultural beliefs and values of a free software virtual organization influence software development processes. It provides examples that illustrate the importance of personal motivation and a sense of working as a team in the perpetuation of a virtual work community. It presents the world of the GNUenterprise.org project as a virtual organizational culture that embodies the beliefs of free software and freedom of choice, and the values of community building and cooperative work. A close study of this project shows how these beliefs and values are manifested in software development methods, artifacts, and tool choice, as well as how dispersed developers cooperate and resolve conflict in a virtual community. Data collection includes the content analysis of Internet Relay Chat archives; kernel cousins archives (summary digests of IRC and mailing list archives); mailing list archives; email interviews; Web site documents and observations; and personal interviews conducted at two open source conferences. Two cases from IRC and mailing list archives of the GNUe virtual community at work are presented for in-depth analyses and comparison. Cultural beliefs and values combined with

For over a century, citizen scientists have volunteered to collect huge quantities of data for professional scientists to analyze. We designed Pathfinder, an online environment that challenges this traditional division of labor by providing tools for citizen scientists to collaboratively discuss and analyze the data they collect. We evaluated Pathfinder in a sustainability and commuting context using a mixed methods approach in both naturalistic and experimental settings. Our results showed that citizen scientists preferred Pathfinder to a standard wiki and were able to go beyond data collection and engage in deeper discussion and analyses. We also found that citizen scientists require special types of technological support because they generate original research. This paper offers an early example of the mutually beneficial relationship between HCI and citizen science.

How has the process of technological change in the Internet era influenced the way we organize economic activities? In this chapter we discuss how information technologies foster the emergent design and user-driven design of websites and other online media, as well as products and organizations offline. A cycle of testing, feedback, and innovation facilitates ongoing negotiations around making products and around organizing that production. We call the organizational state of flux that emerges from these negotiations Permanently Beta. Beta testing, open source software, and interactive communities manifest aspects of permanently beta organization. The instability associated with being permanently beta is not without social costs, but it may present opportunities for organizing broader participation in the design of products and organizations.

Creativity research is a large and varied field in which the subject is characterised on many different levels. The arrival of digital media and computational tools has opened up new possibilities for creative practice. The cutting edge in the digital arts is a highly fertile ground for the investigation of creativity and the role of new technologies. The demands of such work often reveal the limitations of existing technologies and open the door to developing new approaches and techniques. This provides the creativity researcher with opportunities to understand the multi-dimensional characteristics of the creative process. At the same time, it places new demands upon the creators of the technological solutions and pushes forward our understanding of the future requirements of creative technologies. This paper is concerned with the nature of creativity and the design of creativity enhancing computer systems. The research has multi-disciplinary foundations in Human-Computer Interaction and creative practice in Art, Design, Science and Engineering. As a result of a series of studies of creative people and the associated developments in technology, a strategy for practice-based research has evolved in which research and practice are interdependent activities that have mutual benefits as well as distinctive outcomes. This paper charts the development of that co-evolutionary process from the foundation studies to recent outcomes of a major project in art and technology collaboration. The notion of the Studio as a laboratory in the field is introduced and a new methodology for systematic practice-based research is presented. From the results of the investigations that took place, opportunities for the development of technology environments for creative collaboration are propo...

The attention economy motivates participation in peerproduced sites on the Web like YouTube and Wikipedia. However, this economy appears to break down at work. We studied a large internal corporate blogging community using log files and interviews and found that employees expected to receive attention when they contributed to blogs, but these expectations often went unmet. Like in the external blogosphere, a few people received most of the attention, and many people received little or none. Employees expressed frustration if they invested time and received little or no perceived return on investment. While many corporations are looking to adopt Web-based communication tools like blogs, wikis, and forums, these efforts will fail unless employees are motivated to participate and contribute content. We identify where the attention economy breaks down in a corporate blog community and suggest mechanisms for improvement. Author Keywords Blogging, blog readers, attention economy, workplace,