User:Ilya/OpenWetWare/Notes

Shaping the Age of User-Generated Content

 * Speaker: Amy Bruckman, Electronic Learning Communities (ELC) lab
 * Date: 2007-11-02
 * small diffs in usability change user experience dramatically
 * diffs in policy make interesting differences in user behavior
 * allow local groups to establish editorial guidelines
 * challenge: lack local enforcement policies (wide policies are used instead)
 * decentralization happens as a necessity of scale

Apple OSX server wiki

 * seems to be written from scratch, not based on any existing wiki engine
 * cool web interface - may be useful for lab notebook
 * interesting way to make new entries: click new entry, enter title box appears then the editor opens with title and content in separate edit boxes
 * calendar is built in but apparently doesn't work with google calendar

The developmental arc of massive virtual collaboration

 * Kevin Crowston & Isabelle Fagnot, Syracuse University School of Information Studies, 2007-04-13, [[Image:070413_MIT_presentation.pdf]]
 * Free/Libre/Open Source Software Research
 * Why do people contribute to open communities (massive virtual collaboration)?
 * Helpful to design attractive systems or to estimate likely success of projects
 * benefit > cost
 * cost: opportunity cost of time
 * benefit: job offers, ego gratification - in theory; self-determination, human capital - in practice
 * students are motivated differently from workers
 * motivation in Wikipedia (Kuznetsov 2006, Forte & Bruckman 2005) same as in OSS plus reciprocity (expectation of matching contributions)
 * need for other people's articles
 * anonymity affects peer recognition
 * individual roles in project: passive users -> active users -> co-developers -> core developers
 * stages of participation (early stages(1) -> sustained contribution(2) -> meta-contribution(3)):
 * most people, regular users, attracted by visibility of the project (curiosity)
 * received feedback, "helping behavior", social movement; groups become homogeneous over time (attraction -> selection -> attrition)
 * very small number - the "long tail" (list of wikipedians by number of edits (stats.wikimedia.org): 54% once or twice, 25% >= 10x, 5% >= 100x); based on voluntaristic and helping nature, group identity; provide feedback to previous stages: enable more basic contributions
 * practical implications for encouraging contributions:
 * early stages (basic):
 * project is visible enough to attract attention
 * reduce barriers to entry
 * positive feedback -> exponential growth
 * sustained contributions:
 * meaningful tasks
 * shared values
 * sustained contributions increase visibility of project
 * meta contributions:
 * reward by more authority and visibility

Ideas

 * important to provide feedback to users
 * one big channel to ask questions to get max exposure
 * find the right person to talk to (find collaborator)
 * talk to that person (communicate within project)
 * (from Sean Moore): I recently entered a protocol under my lab protocols section that I would like to also have listed on the mail protocols page under "proteins" and "Westerns". Is there a way to use key words so the protocol wil automatically be added to related groups?