1. Studying Community Dynamics CS 294h – 9 FEB 2010

2. USENET [Smith, Fiore]

3. Usenet Visualization (Viégas & Smith) Show correspondence patterns in text forums Initiate vs. reply; size and duration of discussion

4. Newsgroup crowds / Authorlines

6. History Flow Wikipedia History Flow [Viégas et al]

7. Group Lens GroupLens / MovieLens [Univ. Minnesota]

8. GWAP Games with a Purpose [von Ahn et al]

9. Many-Eyes / sense.us Many Eyes [IBM]

10. Mankoff Green FB StepGreen [Mankoff et al]

11. RESEARCH

12. existing system augment environment create new environment observe environment new system

13. self- experimentation observation participant-observation observer participant

14. new system observer existing system participant navel gazing eat your own dog food armchair philosophe r field of dreams meddling researchers

15. observer existing system participant new system

16. Research Approaches Studying characteristics of online communities  Collect usage data; Observe, interview users Intervene in existing systems  e.g., Facebook apps  Controlled experimentation Introduce + study new systems  Requires massive investment (?) Mining social media  Recommendation and matching algorithms, …

17. Research Questions How and why do people join communities? How is collective action organized? Why do people contribute? (Incentives) Issues of quality control, privacy, trust, … What are the interactions between social structure and system design? How do these findings generalize and inform the design of new socio-technical systems?

18. EXAMPLE: WORLD OF WARCRAFT

19. World of Warcraft World of Warcraft [Yee, Ducheneaut et al]

22. EXAMPLE: COORDINATION IN WIKIPEDIA

23. History Flow Wikipedia History Flow [Viégas et al]

24. “Emergent” Order and Coordination

25. “Talk” Pages on Wikipedia Viégas et al. 2007

26. Coordination on Wikipedia “… [we] note that administrative and coordinating elements seem to be growing at a faster pace than the bulk of articles in the encyclopedia [Wikipedia]” Viégas et al. 2007

27. Wiki Dashboard Wiki Dashboard [Suh et al]

28. EXAMPLE: COLLABORATIVE TAGGING

29. Collaborative Tagging & Rating

30. Forms of Tagging (Golder ‘05)  Identifying what (or who) it is about. (topics)  Identifying what it is. (“blog”, “book”, “video”)  Identifying who owns it.  Refining categories.  Identifying qualities or characteristics. (“funny”)  Self reference. (“mystuff”)  Task organizing. (“toread”)

31. Personal Tag Usage

32. Inferences from Tag Order?

33. Stability of Tag Use

34. [Chi & Mytkowicz]

35. [Budiu, Pirolli, & Hong]

36. EXAMPLE: SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS

37. DEMO

38. Who is my best friend?

39. The Strength of Weak Ties “Interpersonal Ties” – Strong, Weak, or Absent Tie strength modeled as a combination of time, emotional intensity, intimacy, and services. Weak ties shown to:  Provide the majority of the network structure  Transmit novel information among groups [Granovetter 73, 83]

40. Eliciting Tie Strength [Gilbert ‘09]

43. Model Prediction

44. How might you apply these results?