SI529 - Class Notes

Week 1

Sean was a political blogger?

Stake then support design decisions drawing on network and social sciences.

Weekly blog entries...written by Thursday night. A little different the first couple weeks.

What makes a good community? It has to exist It should be accessible to you There should be activity Should be one where it's okay that I study it and the community is cool with it A community that has new comers Are there recognizable personalities? Are there interactions that can be observed? How do people interact with each other?

Try and do Yelp.com? What might be a better option?

What is a community? We're looking for metaphors Shared or Common interests values experiences goals norms/expectations group identity interaction/communication proximity interdependency support knowledge dynamic (change over time) behavior norms/customs whole is bigger than the sum of its parts reciprocity participation inside/outside dist(?) comfortable/familiar boundaries acts as a whole reputation center and periphery (how to tell if a newcomer or not)

Communities have warm fuzzies.

Wenger: CoP are bound informally. Learning is not an accumulation of facts. A database isn't learning. Learning is getting better at being able to do things better, perhaps supported by databases of information. Act knowingly is an arbiter of whether a person has learned something.

Wellman: Use study of social networks to make predictions and distinctions about online networks. What is the different of thinking of someone as a network versus a group. Dense / sparse alludes to the number of possible connections between people in the network. The network approach is focused on connections and where they exist or whether connections extend outside the boundaries of those that are connected. Dense, bounded, closed versus sparse, unbounded, not closed. Closed (cliquish) if my friends are friends with each other. Not closed if my friends are not friends of my other friends.

How dense, what is the range of relationships, what is the relationship strengths. Do people communicate once in awhile or someone that would bail you of jail.

Paul: It's a community when it can go off topic "together". A useful litmus test. Teasing or inside jokes?

Oldenburg:

Neutral place 3rd place, all interact as equals Conversation is the main activity Leveling aspects - people come together mostly as equals accessibility and conversation typically open long hours low profile

3rd place, is facebook a third place to me? Also, are IRC channels like a third place?

By noon, a week from tomorrow if you're the conversation starter online.

Week 2

Powazek: you start with the content and the community comes after. I don't agree with it so started a discussion... What is a site that starts with content and a community forms around it? You pay and or entice people by giving the community attention.

There are issues that come with respect to managing conflict, divergent interests, will be talked about later.

Tensions of ownership and management of the community. Who gets to exercise control, and when should an entity? Maybe even constituencies within an online community. Conflicts among interests within communities. the way you handle them can have different effects.

Kim: The idea of having a back story for a community. Maybe a tag line. Back stories can help establish personality.

Take away the analytic framework: Domain, community, and practice. The ways that people interact with each. Mutual engagement. How people influence each other. Practice, or the "shared reportoire"..resources available for interaction, jargon, in jokes, stories, norms to hold people accountable.

• Use this framework to describe my community (yelp.com).

Laura's "civic discussion group"...they often stay and have a cup of coffee and chat. They've been doing this for 20 years. Is the domain missing from that example? How specific does the domain have to be defined? What qualifies something as a "domain" or a community of practice. What are they practicing.

Is there a knowledge domain? What would someone new have to know or learn if they were to get involved?

Domain does exist because you don't get the references if you don't know the history of the town and things. In gossip group, community lens is easy, they clearly have a practice, but do we consider it a domain? In the book, communities of practice are more geared to businesses like processing insurance claims. The knowledge about how to be a claims processor. The culture of being a claims processor.

Domains, are people getting more expert at something...maybe being at expert at being a member of the community. In the book the domain isn't just about being part of the community. There is a production of information that is domain specific that exists independent of the members. Natural outcome of getting "good" at the domain.

Which comes first, the domain, the community, or the practice? Kind of co-emerges. Not really there until you have all three.

Wenger is a good paper to follow when analyzing whether something is a community of practice or not.

Design from Theory: Introduction Does it make sense to design an online community?

How can you design something for people to be nice to each other? Design is more than just the IA of an online community application.

What are the things you can change from a design perspective? See page 10.

These things are levers for controlling what is available and how people can interact.

• Look for design alternatives that satisfy or fit/don't into the categories in the table on page 10.

Page 18 presents logical structures for design claims. Follow these when writing reports later.

Find anecdotal evidence to support design claims as well as drawing on evidence from social science theories or findings that have been articulated for more general settings beyond online communities.

Look for other structures (from logic?) for three logical structures for design claims.

Wants to supplement the designer's experience. Leggs would hire Jackie who would read the book, not that Legg's would read the book necessarily.

Kraut, Robert, & Olson, Judith, & Banaji, Mahzarin, & Bruckman, Amy, & Cohen, Jeffrey, & Couper, Mick (2003). Psychological Research Online: Opportunities and Challenges.

Belmont rules, ethical principles. Procedural and policy guidelines.

Research is the production of generalized knowledge that doesn't exist. We are doing things for our own good. If we were doing research, an institution could be looking over our shoulder to make sure we were following ethical stuff.

What would make research exempt? Secondary analysis from de-id'ed data. Public observation in a place where people don't have expectation of privacy. Some of our communities might be public, some might not.

IRB changed some of it's rules relative to internet surveying and have changed the ruling on some things.

But researcher doesn't get to decide, the IRB review board makes the call.

In most cases for our research communitiy, we'll want to inform them somehow. If you think you might be doing something artificial, you might want to get some permission to do that sort of thing. Pay attention to terms of service of who we are studying.

• Email Yelp.com for permission to do research. Review their terms of service. Maybe I can get input from Yelp?

Put a note in my blog about the community I'm studying. Get a second opinion if you have even the slightest inkling that you might need permission.

Resnick talks about united way project: Need to tap the informal networks. What's the simplest kernel that could be useful?

uw.si.umich.edu - aggregates comments from partner sites. Uses an IFrame to pull in the comment part to a web page. offline analogue for the effort is where people talk about what am i going to do for health insurance...i.e., neighbors, barbers, friends in michigan.

The comment header could show the comment source and/or target.

Comment mirroring via an iframe...very clever approach to gathering content and resources from multiple sources.

Looking for suggestions for taglines or branding detail.

For community project, people have to recognize each other.

Domain is opinion on places. There ought to be regulars. Identifiable. Is there locality of interaction. What do they do...are there any natural boundaries?

Practice has a more specific meaning, what are the resources available that make the interactions go well. in jokes, shared vocab, stories you have in common, mechanisms of accountability. Describe the recurring features of how people interact with each other. How can they count on and use to interpret how they interact. Allow them to understand what happens to them and to understand how interaction goes.

Think about somebody reading my paper, they should get something that they wouldn't notice if they looked at the community themselves for a few minutes.

Week 3

This week we have readings about that touch on the rhythms of activity (events and rituals in the Kim reading; also in Wenger et al). We also have readings about the structure of online conversation and how conversation relates to other information objects.

In class, we'll hear from a few of you who have selected communities with interesting events or rituals, or who have an unusual converation architecture. We'll also reflect on your experiences editing on wikipedia.

Received a turtle this week. Hurray for me.

Wikipedia assignment. Key take aways:

• Now we have a perspective to talk about the community that supports wikipedia
• There are many communities and a big community and they have ways to hold people accountable. It's not what the media says, anybody can edit but you have to edit well.
• There was a technical learning curve but he was more interested in the social aspects.
• The quality of the content is improved because of their processes for editing and citing sources.
• People that are there at the end get to make the decisions.

Wenger

Wenger: Seven Principles for Cultivating Communities of Practice. In Cultivating Communities of Practice. Chapter 3 (PDF)

What does it mean to have public and private spaces? Private spaces are more one to one communication within the sphere of the community of practice?

Do we need both public and private spaces for a community to be successful? It is a universal thing for cultivating community of practice? Personal invitations tend to be better than a broadcast to a bunch of people. When there are no private spaces, and everything is public, what are the tensions that emerge?

Standards projects. Resnick one once. It was all email, discussion was supposed to happen publicly. It was an accountability reason to avoid too much for one to one communications. Transparency is sometimes very important. Open source projects are like too. If you find a bug you put it somewhere everyone can see. Avoids duplicates, among other things.

There are some reasons that you might push for purely public space in an community of practice.

Discussion went on for awhile about whether sharing private type stuff in a public forum.

Design principles

Familiarity and excitement.

What creates familiarity and what creates excitement?

• Familiarity
  • Look and feel, graphic elements
  • Something you see that is the same each time
  • Repetition of topics
  • Linguistic usage
  • Having the same people
  • Rituals
  • Events
  • Inside jokes
  • Familiarity comes from sameness
  • History
  • Well-known outside things (places or people)
• Excitement
  • celebrity guest, speaker
  • competitions
  • Event with wide participation
  • Recognition, voting
  • External visibility (Sean's example of writing about a community
  • Controversy (sometimes controversy is familiar)
  • Change (new people, new interface, new jokes, newness...)
  • Annual events (anticipation, knowledge that it's approaching)
  • Milestones or achievements
  • New members
  • Rhythm (predictable and regular events)
    • Things that happen at a particular time
    • Does Yelp have any particular rhythm's or elections of sorts?
    • Daily activity things like the opening of markets.
  • Pace (different than rhythm)
    • How much of your life can the community take up?
    • Visibility of activity so you'd know what to expect.

In the forum postings, be clear when you're paraphrasing versus quoting.

Events and Rituals

Readings from Amy Jo Kim.

Look a little deeper into our community of study and think about familiarity and excitement.

A little out of date, and not really relevant even when they read it in 2000. There are some timeless concepts in the chapters.

Meetings

• Wine tasting example (community coordinates buying and sampling of specific wines).

'Performances

• DJ slots at Second Life

Competitions

• Competing for generosity
• Competition has a beginning and end?
• Experts exchange, each question

Rituals
Does my community have rituals? What rituals might emerge?

What can you do to create rituals? A ritual is something that is done in response to something happening. Leads you to expect something to follow something because it's a ritual. Things become habitual, there is predictable response. Like AA meetings, "Hi Paul"...it's a ritual.

Rituals are shared, communal rituals as opposed to personal rituals.

Something that makes an event official...stock bell rings to open and/or close.

Looks for these things or where it could happen in our community.

Conversation and Structure

Shows the an example of pivots on the Drupal site. Look at one item and be able to navigate to other items related to it.

General idea to take away, there are objects that are getting referred to in conversation. If they can be extracted then it can be useful to do so for cross linking related topics.

Precision and recall determine relate to finding mention of objects in discussion for which to create links.

Mentioned www.gwap.com, games with a purpose, you compete with others, or connect with others, and the tags are used to improve searching.

Make it fun to do something, but produces something that is useful.

Talked a bit about CSS-D and the use of wiki and how they referred.

Wikis fail when people feel like they can't step on someone else toes and are afraid to update a page even if they should and can.

Shared email group is for all the wiki as opposed to talk pages that are one-to-one relative to a particular page. The wiki is a tips and tricks, but the email list is to help people solve problems. With css-d, discussion came first. If the repository came first, how to get discussion?

How and when to make use of threaded discussions or to have a wiki? What makes the most sense for information control and sharing.

What is the different media available, how to get people to use things that are best suited for the circumstances.

What about back channel? Might be a bridge to people members and non-members? Some might only follow the back-channel and aren't participating in the event. Like following twitter feeds for events. Some workshops people might be blogging about what's going on. People might comment and contribute to events.

What other places does this kind of interaction happen? Back channel on events?

For a classroom, backchannel chat rooms are hard for the teacher to follow it. Attention was hard to maintain between students and the channel.

For next week: Assignment due, description of the online community.