Abstract—Citizen science is a form of research collaboration

The first decade of the World Wide Web predominantly enforced a clear separation between designers and consumers. New technological developments, such as the cyberinfrastructure and Web 2.0 architectures, have emerged to support a participatory Web and social computing. These developments are the foundations for a fundamental shift from consumer cultures (specialized in producing finished goods to be consumed passively) to cultures of participation (in which all people are provided with the means to participate actively in personally meaningful activities). End-user development and meta-design provide foundations for this fundamental transformation. They explore and support new approaches for the design, adoption, appropriation, adaptation, evolution, and sharing of artifacts by all participating stakeholders. They take into account that cultures of participation are not dictated by technology alone: they are the result of incremental shifts in human behavior and social organizations. The design, development, and assessment of five particular applications that contributed to the development of our theoretical framework are described and discussed.

Today many people with serious diseases use online support groups to seek social support. For these groups to be sustained and effective, member retention and commitment is important. Our study examined how different types and amounts of social support in an online cancer support group are associated with participants’ length of membership. We first built machine learning models to automatically identify the extent to which messages contained emotional and informational support. Agreement with human judges was high (r> 0.76). We then used these models to measure the support exchanged in 1.5 million messages. Finally, we applied quantitative event history analysis to assess how exposure to emotional and informational support predicted group members ’ length of subsequent participation. Emotional support was positively associated and informational support was negatively associated with how long members remained in the group. We speculate that emotional support enhanced members’ relationships with one another or the group as a whole, whereas informational support satisfied members ’ shortterm information needs.

Abstract—Citizen science is a form of research collaboration

Abstract—This paper presents a three-part experiment designed to investigate the motivations of users of a community safety and neighborhood watch social networking website. The experiment centers around an intervention into the invitation system that current users employ to invite nonmembers to join the site, and involves several versions of an invitation email which differ by expressing one of four possible motivations for using such a site. The research presented investigates how potential users ’ choice of whether or not to join the site is affected by the use case presented by the invitation. It also includes an investigation of the motivations of current users of the site, as reported in an online survey. The experiment yielded no significant difference in responses to the emails. Overall, invitations that included a specific motivation slightly outperformed those which did not, but not to a statistically significant degree. We conclude that although users have specific motivations for using the site, as reported in the survey, attempting to increase response rates to invitation emails by suggesting use cases of the site is surprisingly unlikely to be successful. Index Terms—online communities, social media, community safety, neighborhood watch, participation, motivation, invitations I.

The goal of the Climate Collaboratorium project is to harness the collective intelligence of thousands of people around the world to address one of the most important problems confronting humanity today: global climate change. Inspired by systems like Wikipedia and Linux, the project will develop a global, on-line forum in which people can create, analyze, and ultimately select detailed plans for what we humans can do about global climate change. At the core of the system will be an evolving collection of user-created plans based on computational models of the actions humans can take and the predicted impacts of those actions. For instance, the actions in a plan might include reducing greenhouse gas emissions by various amounts or implementing policies such as a carbon tax. The impacts might include concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, temperature changes, and economic costs. Users can also debate plans by entering arguments for or against the various plans or by entering other comments about the plans ’ plausibility and desirability. And users can rate the credibility of various arguments and vote on the plans and positions they find most feasible, credible, and desirable. Just as important as developing the software capabilities, the project will also develop the community and organizational processes to use this software, and empirically evaluate the actual use of

A challenge for many online production communities is to direct their members to accomplish tasks that are important to the group, even when these tasks may not match individual members ’ interests. Here we investigate how combining group identification and direction setting can motivate volunteers in online communities to accomplish tasks important to the success of the group as a whole. We hypothesize that group identity, the perception of belonging to a group, triggers in-group favoritism; and direction setting (including explicit direction from group goals and implicit direction from role models) focuses people’s group-oriented motivation towards the group’s important tasks. We tested our hypotheses in the context of Wikipedia's Collaborations of the Week (COTW), a group goal setting mechanism and a social event within Wikiprojects. Results demonstrate that 1) publicizing important group goals via COTW can have a strong motivating influence on editors who have voluntarily identified themselves as group members compared to those who have not self-identified; 2) the effects of goals spill over to non-goal related tasks; and 3) editors exposed to group role models in COTW are more likely to perform similarly to the models on group-relevant citizenship behaviors. Finally, we discuss design and managerial implications based on our findings.

Online learning has matured as a mechanism that can change how we deliver education. Open education resources are proliferating, and institutions are creating massive open online courses (MOOCs). In addition, efforts are underway to develop platforms that allow individuals to create, lead, and participate in their own courses. This bottom-up, peer-to-peer model of education illuminates new dilemmas. For example, open learning environments are heavily dependent on voluntary individual participation, but such participation is difficult to foster. In this paper, we use log data from the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) to explore factors related to active participation in a series of teacher, professional development courses (the P2PU School of Education). We employ learning analytics to identify how features such as course page design and course organizer activity interact with new and returning participants to foster increased participation in open learning groups. 1.

Although many off-line organizations give their employees training, mentorship, a cohort and other socialization experiences that improve their retention and productivity, online production communities rarely do this. This paper describes the planning, execution and evaluation of a socialization regime for an online technical support community. In a two-phase project, we first automatically identified from participants ’ early behavior, those with high potential to become core members. We then designed, delivered and experimentally evaluated socialization experiences intended to build commitment and competence among these potential core members. We were able to identify potential core members with high accuracy from only two weeks of behavior. A year later, those classified as potential core members participated in the community ten times more actively than those not identified. In an evaluation experiment, some potential core members were randomly assigned to receive socialization experiences, while others were not. A year later, those who had participated in the socialization regime contributed more answers in the community compared to those in the control condition. The socialization experiences, however, undercut their sense of connection to the community and the quality of their contributions. We discuss what was effective and what could be improved in designing socialization experiences for online groups.

Abstract. The dramatic success of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, blogs, and traditional discussion groups empowers individuals to become active in local and global communities. With modest redesign, these technologies can be harnessed to support national priorities such as healthcare/wellness, disaster response, community safety, energy sustainability, etc. This talk describes a research agenda for these topics that develops deep science questions and extreme technology challenges.