Events - Colloquia & Seminars
CCIS Colloquium Spring 2006
Helping hands: Design for member-maintained online communities
Speaker: Dan Cosley
Affiliation: GroupLens Research Project, University of Minnesota
Host: Carole Hafner
Date: Friday, April 21, 2006
Talk: 12:00 pm, 366 WVH
Abstract
From finding friends on mySpace to finding support for cancer survivors, millions of people turn to online communities every day for information, companionship, support, and fun. These communities need regular maintenance: welcoming and mentoring new members, reviewing contributions, and building community-specific databases, for example. Typically, a dedicated few perform these tasks, leaving the community vulnerable to their goodwill and unable to respond to rapid growth.
Rather than rely on a few, communities might allow all members to participate in maintenance. Wikipedia and Slashdot highlight the potential and the problems of this approach. The English language Wikipedia has over 1 million articles. Yet quality and process disputes have founders Jim Wales and Larry Sanger deeply divided over how to proceed.
In this talk we will address two fundamental challenges facing member-maintained communities: motivating people to contribute, and ensuring that contributions are valuable. We develop and deploy algorithms for matching people with tasks in a large online community. Effective algorithms far outperform schemes commonly used in online communities. We also investigate the design of interfaces for reviewing contributions, asking two questions inspired by Wikipedia: can peers review as well as experts, and does review before accepting a contribution improve quality? Empirical results and mathematical models of quality suggest that the answers are yes, and no.
Biography