A7ParticipationSpectrum

A7ParticipationSpectrum

To-Do

Please Document the Following Sections:

• title for your course project
• members of your team
• abstract
• expected final outcome
• brief description of work done so far on the project
• brief description of work to be done in the next few weeks (e.g.: before spring break)
• describe specific research emphasis of every member of your team
• list of relevant references investigated
• list any specific problems you have encountered and need feedback/guidance on

GerhardComments

• you should collaborate, exchange information and notes with the "Umbrella" project -- specifically their Facebook subgroup
• you should define the focus of the individual group members in your team
• your background / references should be extended --> here is one article:

Fischer, G., A. Piccinno, and Y. Ye (2008): "The Ecology of Participants in Co-Evolving Socio-Technical Environments", In Proceedings of 2nd Conference on Human-Centered Software Engineering (HCSE 2008) http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/HCSE-2009.pdf

• think about that participation can be defined as: utility = value / effort -->people will participate

• if they see a high value
• if they effort requires is small

• reflect upon whether there are drawbacks within "participation cultures" - e.g.: do different groups gain or loose
• how do participation cultures compare with "Do-It-Yourself" cultures?

Members

Joe McCabe, Ben Golden, Graham Roberts, Nick Hughes

Title

Motivations for Participation in Collaborative Design: Studying a Spectrum of Participation. (Facebook, Warcraft 3, Iphone Apps)

Abstract

Our team would like to formally investigate why people participate and contribute to different areas of technology. We decided to use Facebook as our central focus, we hope that using facebook as an example can provide insight into participation in general. With Facebook users are allowed to share their own personal content with others. Additionally users may comment on other content created by friends. We hope that through exploring this phenomenon in Facebook, we can draw conclusions about what inspires someone to contribute in other forums, such as developing an iphone app, uploading videos to youtube, or contributing to a wiki.

ExpectedOutcome

We hope to understand what drives people to participate in online collaborative communitites. For Facebook, we expect that the motivation is peer respect and sense of community. While this motivation is surely not consistent across all platforms, it seems reasonable to assume that similar motivations can be seen in different areas of interest. i.e. someone may contribute map content to a video game community for the same reasons that someone posts content to a facebook profile.

WorkSoFar

So far we have had a few meetings to discuss the direction of the project, starting with narrowing down the technologies to evaluate. Eventually we decided that pursuing multiple platforms would be to broad. We narrowed our focus just to Facebook as it is a much more universal platform than developing iphone applications or map content for Warcraft 3. Since this decision we have developed a Questionnaire, and distributed it to several people of varying age and technological background.

WorkToBeDone

We need to gather the completed questionnaires and analyze the results.

describe specific research emphasis of every member of your team

References

http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/user-generated-content

list any specific problems you have encountered and need feedback/guidance on

We had to change the scope of our project, from war3, iphone apps, and facebook, to just facebook. Holger pointed out that 3 platforms may be too broad, and we agreed.