User:Ilya/OpenWetWare/Notes

Talks

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, File: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)):
  1. most people, regular users, attracted by visibility of the project (curiosity)
  2. received feedback, "helping behavior", social movement; groups become homogeneous over time (attraction -> selection -> attrition)
  3. 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