Lecture 12

pdf version

Richer Ecology of Participation

Gerhard Fischer, Hal Eden, and Holger Dick — Fall Semester 2010

gerhard@colorado.edu; haleden@colorado.edu; holger.dick@gmail.com;  

October 11, 2010

paper: Preece, J., & Shneiderman, B. (2009) "The Reader-to-Leader Framework: Motivating Technology-Mediated Social Participation," AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, 1(1), pp. 13-32.

http://xwiki.cs.colorado.edu/bin/download/HCCF2010/Relevant%20Resources/Reader%2Dto%2DLeader%2DFINAL.pdf

The Reader-to-Leader Framework
<<source: Preece & Shneiderman>>

• billions of people participate in online social activities

• most users participate as readers of discussion boards, searchers of blog posts, or viewers of photos.

• a fraction of users become contributors of user-generated content by writing consumer product reviews, uploading travel photos, or expressing political opinions.

• some users move beyond such individual efforts to become collaborators, forming tightly connected groups with lively discussions whose outcome might be a Wikipedia article or a carefully edited YouTube video.

• a small fraction of users becomes leaders, who participate in governance by setting and upholding policies, repairing vandalized materials, or mentoring novices

The Problem with Undifferentiated Views of Participation

• some social media environments cannot be understood as simple aggregation of the behavior of some non-existent average use

• any measure of “average” participation becomes meaningless

• the story of “Bill Gates entering a bar”

A More Detailed Look at Participation

• participating in cultures of participation taps into the previously inaccessible knowledge of individual citizens and creates a sense of community

• claim: despite the public and corporate enthusiasm and the proclamations of utopian visionaries, the reality is:

• many web sites fail to retain participants
• tagging initiatives go quiet,
• online communities become ghost towns.
• many government agencies are reluctant to even try social participation, fearing public uprising, pornography, or slander.
• many social applications just aren’t social at all and see little or no activity

• claim: there are few stories about durable large-scale successes that deal with difficult issues such as crime reporting, disaster response large scale epidemics such as AIDS, or fighting terror

Richer Ecologies of Participation

• in the past:

• software developers and users
• producers and consumers
• professionals and amateurs

• in the future: more roles — beyond passive, undifferentiated consumers

• producers, raters, taggers, curators, stewards, active users, passive users
• prosumers— Tapscott, D., & Williams, A. D. (2006) Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, Portofolio, Penguin Group, New York, NY.
• pro-ams — Leadbeater, C., & Miller, P. (2008) The Pro-Am Revolution — How Enthusiasts Are Changing Our Economy and Society, available at http://www.demos.co.uk/files/proamrevolutionfinal.pdf.

• roles are distributed in communities:

• power users, local developers, gardeners — Nardi, B. A. (1993) A Small Matter of Programming, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

• challenge: support migration paths with “low threshold, high ceiling” architectures 

The Reader-to-Leader Framework
<<source: Preece & Shneiderman>>

• terminology:

Richer Ecologies of Participation:
Consumer ? Contributor ? Collaborator ? Meta-Designer

Boundaries are not clear-cut

• consumers

• passive consumers (lurkers)
• active consumers

• active consumers (= contributors??) — example: reading a book

• reading a book (personal translation and integration)
• highlighting and annotating the book extensively
• sharing the annotations with others

• lead users (a concept identified by Eric von Hippel)

• are inventors of successful innovations
• have a high incentive to solve a problem
• early adopters (ahead of the target market)
• example: Tim Berners-Lee = inventor of WWW + he needed hypertext and networked computers

Usability and Sociability Factors

for

Socio-Technical Environments

• usability factors are of interest to designers

• sociability factors are of interest to community participants, site owners, and managers

Usability and Sociability Factors Influencing Consumers (Readers)
<<source: Preece & Shneiderman>>

Books available as Printed Copies and as PDF files

• Benkler, Y. (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

• printed copy (to buy): Benkler, Y. (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yale University Press, New Haven.
• PDF file (free): http://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks.pdf
• 15,000 and 20,000 people have accessed the book electronically
• some of them adding comments and links

• von Hippel, E. (2005) Democratizing Innovation

• printed copy (to buy): von Hippel, E. (2005) Democratizing Innovation, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
• PDF file (free): http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ1.htm

• why give away your work for free?

• preventing copying is impossible
• with free copies authors attract people who buy printed copies

Granularity of Participation for Contributors

• granularity = refers to the size of the modules, in terms of the time and effort that an individual must invest in producing them

• examples in Google SketchUP / 3D Warehouse:

• contributing a model to the 3D warehouse
• rating a model
• tagging a model
• being a curator establishing a collection
• downloading a model to Google Earth
• difference between 3D Warehouse and EDC

Usability and Sociability Factors that may influence Contributing
<<source: Preece & Shneiderman>>

Curators: Overseeing / Organizing Collection of Objects

• curators:

• historically: content specialists overseeing physical collection of objects
• 21st century: the role has expanded to encompass digital objects as well as physical ones.

• digital curatorship:

• similarities: digital collections are essentially the same things as those with which curator's have always dealt with ? knowledge of the content, interpretation and access remain fundamental to the curator's task
• differences: knowledge of content and organization of collections of digital objects has been opened wide to those with the tools and infrastructure to access digital media ? anyone can take on the role of curator

• example: Encyclopedia of Life (EOL)

• has developed a Curatorial Network Plan where any registered professional or amateur may help develop content for species
• Master Curators may be assigned to reconcile information for pages with multiple curatorial inputs

Usability and Sociability Factors that may influence Collaborating
<<source: Preece & Shneiderman>>

The Talk Page in Wikipedia

• talk page

• rich context attached to many Wikipedia articles
• writers for an article hash out their differences, plan future edits, and come to agreement about tricky rhetorical points

• value added:

• this kind of debate doubtless happens in the New York Times and Britannica as well, but behind the scenes
• Wikipedia readers can see it all, and understand how choices were made

From “Barack Obama” Talk Page
—
Commission report on oil spill

• A commission report on the Obama Administration's handling of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill was released today.[32] Should it be mentioned in the article? Truthsort (talk) 15:25, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

• This is meant to be a biography of Barack Obama's entire life, so I would argue that this report isn't notable enough within that context. There are a couple of daughter articles that would seem more appropriate places. -- Scjessey (talk) 15:34, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

• There should probably be a short mention in this article under the oil spill section. A more detailed entry would be better entered on the main article of the oil spill and the Obama Presidency article. Although I would use references from the Washington Post and New York Times, with an additional link to the Commission's original report documents. Dave Dial (talk) 16:25, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

Usability and Sociability Factors that may influence Leadership
<<source: Preece & Shneiderman>>

Participative Software Systems (PSS)

• design does not end at the time of deployment

• success hinges on continued participations and contributions of users at use time

• achieve the best fit between the system and its ever-changing context of use, problems, domains, users, and communities of users by being evolved continuously at the hand of users

Ecologies in Specific Systems

Open Source Software (OSS) Systems

• original designers of OSS systems do not provide a complete solution that addresses all problems of potential users

• they provide an “under-designed seed” as a solution space that can be evolved by its users at use time via making the source code available

• enabling conditions for collaborative construction of software by changing software from a fixed entity that is produced and controlled by a closed group of designers to an open effort that allows a community to design collaboratively by

• changing source code
• sharing changes over the Internet
• foster social support among community members

End-Users and Developers in Software Systems

Ecologies in Open Source Communities

Roles and Community Structure in OSS Communities

• Passive User use the system in the same way as most of us use commercially available Closed Source Software. They are attracted to OSS mainly due to its high quality and the potential to be changed when needed.

• Readers are active users of the system; they not only use the system, but also try to understand how the system works by reading the source code.

• Bug Reporters discover and report bugs; they do not fix the bugs themselves, and they may not read source code either. They assume the same role as testers in the traditional software development model.

• Bug Fixers fix bugs that either they discover by themselves or are reported by other members. Bug Fixers have to read and understand a small portion of the source code of the system where the bug occurs.

Roles and Community Structure in OSS Communities

• Peripheral Developers occasionally contribute new functionality or features to the existing system. Their contribution is irregular, and the period of involvement is short and sporadic.

• Active Developers regularly contribute new features and fix bugs; they are one of the major development forces of OSS systems.

• Core Members are responsible for guiding and coordinating the development of an OSS project. Core Members are those people who have been involved with the project for a relative long time and have made significant contributions to the development and evolution of the system.

• Project Leaders are often the person who has initiated the project. They are responsible for the vision and overall direction of the project.

Funnel Effect

<<source: Porter, J. (2008) Designing for the Social Web., New Riders., Berkeley, CA>>

Approximate Quantitative Data for a Specific Application (analysis: Holger Dick)

Wikipedia (data: July 2010; Wikipedia)

• readers

• around 360 million unique visitors in July

• contributors

• 1,185,536 contributors (615473 in English Wikipedia)
• users are considered contributors if they have made at least 10 edits since creating their account
• 81,071 of them were active (36148 in English Wikipedia)
• contributors are considered "active" if they have made at least 5 edits in July 2010

• collaborators

• 1756 Admins in English Wikipedia (as of 10/4/2010)
• 10389 collaborators (3661 in English Wikipedia); users with at least 100 contributions in July alone

• leaders

• 36 Bureaucrats in English Wikipedia (as of 10/4/2010)
• 27 wikimedia foundation employees (as of June 2009)

Ecology of Participation: Roles in English Wikipedia

Funnel Effect: Ratios

• contributor/collaborator ratio:

• all contributors/admins: 350/1
• active contributors/admins: 20/1
• but: official number of Users/Admin varies significantly from these numbers, and between languages: 3400 for the German Wikipedia, 10532 for the Spanish Wikipedia

• 
  
  • collaborator/leader ratio:

• admins to bureaucrats: 49/1

• 
  
  • approxiate scale for reader ? participant ? curator ? meta-designer:
     10,000,000 ? 10,000 ? 200 ? 1

How to Reduce the Funnel Effect

• 
  
  • utility = value / effort

• value: personally meaningful, incentives, reputation, beyond monetary rewards
• effort: lower cost for learning and acting, identify contextualized sweet spots
• Inverse of Turing Tar Pit: “if the interface is too restrictive, people won’t use it”
• Turing Tar Pit: “if the interface is too flexible, people do not know how to use it”

• crowd-contributing works when tasks are broken down to small enough pieces so that the cost is low enough for individuals to move from consumers to contributors

How to Reduce the Funnel Effect

• how to migrate to the more demanding roles (from left to right in the diagram):

• How do we encourage individuals to make the initial contribution?
• How do we encourage first-time contributors to contribute again?
• How do we encourage members to contribute at a higher level?

• 
  
  • support and foster community building

• technology cannot solve people problems
• social human problems: garner interest, get people excited, find ways that people talk about the systems, …

Design Guidelines for Participation

• Embracing Users as Co-Designers

• Providing a Common Platform

• Enabling Legitimate Peripheral Participation

• Sharing Control

• Promoting Mutual Learning and Support

• Fostering a Social Rewarding and Recognition Structure