Designing and Evaluating Techniques to Enhance Participation in Online Communities

Speaker
Loren Terveen
Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Minnesota

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

Online communities can help people form productive relationships. Unfortunately, this potential is not always fulfilled: many communities fail, and designers don’t have a solid understanding of why. We know community activity attracts more activity: the trick, however, is to get the initial activity started.

Social science theories suggest methods to spark positive community participation. We are doing work to design and field test techniques inspired by social theories. I will report on one of our efforts in this area. We carried out a field experiment centered around two factors, similarity and uniqueness. We formed discussion communities around an existing movie recommendation web site, manipulating: (1) similarity—we controlled how similar group members’ movie ratings were; and (2) uniqueness—we told members how their movie ratings (with respect to a discussion topic) were unique within the group. Both factors positively influenced participation. The results offer a practical success story in applying social science theory to the design of online communities. They also suggest productive areas for future research.

Speaker's Bio

Loren Terveen is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Minnesota. Before joining the University of Minnesota, he received his PhD in Computer Sciences from the University of Texas at Austin, then spent 11 years at AT&T Labs / Bell Labs. Terveen’s research interests are human-computer interaction and computer-mediated communication. Currently, he is working on projects to (1) create theory, implement and test techniques, and develop guidelines for increasing people’s contributions to online communities, and (2) investigate how socially meaningful places constrain people’s information needs, and then incorporate the concept of places into location-based community information systems.

Speaker's Website
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~terveen/

Host
Robert Kraut