Andrés Monroy-Hernández

FEATURE Empowering kids to create and share programmable media

This article reflects on the first eight months of existence of the Scratch Online Community by discussing the design rationale and learning theories underlying Scratch and its website.

Whoo.ly: facilitating information seeking for hyperlocal communities using social media

Social media systems promise powerful opportunities for people to connect to timely, relevant information at the hyper local level. Yet, finding the meaningful signal in noisy social media streams can be quite daunting to users. In this paper, we present and evaluate Whoo.ly, a web service that provides neighborhood-specific information based on Twitter posts that were automatically inferred to be hyperlocal. Whoo.ly automatically extracts and summarizes hyperlocal information about events, topics, people, and places from these Twitter posts. We provide an overview of our design goals with Whoo.ly and describe the system including the user interface and our unique event detection and summarization algorithms. We tested the usefulness of the system as a tool for finding neighborhood information through a comprehensive user study. The outcome demonstrated that most participants found Whoo.ly easier to use than Twitter and they would prefer it as a tool for exploring their neighborhoods.

Narco emotions: affect and desensitization in social media during the mexican drug war

Social media platforms have emerged as prominent information sharing ecosystems in the context of a variety of recent crises, ranging from mass emergencies, to wars and political conflicts. We study affective responses in social media and how they might indicate desensitization to violence experienced in communities embroiled in an armed conflict. Specifically, we examine three established affect measures: negative affect, activation, and dominance as observed on Twitter in relation to a number of statistics on protracted violence in four major cities afflicted by the Mexican Drug War. During a two year period (Aug 2010 - Dec 2012), while violence was on the rise in these regions, our findings show a decline in negative emotional expression as well as a rise in emotional arousal and dominance in Twitter posts: aspects known to be psychological markers of desensitization. We discuss the implications of our work for behavioral health, facilitating rehabilitation efforts in communities enmeshed in an acute and persistent urban warfare, and the impact on civic engagement.

The Remixing Dilemma The Trade-Off Between Generativity and Originality

In this article we argue that there is a trade-off between generativity and originality in online communities that support open collaboration. We build on foundational theoretical work in peer production to formulate and test a series of hypotheses suggesting that the generativity of creative works is associated with moderate complexity, prominent authors, and cumulativeness. We also formulate and test three hypotheses that these qualities are associated with decreased originality in resulting derivatives. Our analysis uses a rich data set from the Scratch Online Community—a large website where young people openly share and remix animations and video games. We discuss the implications of this trade-off for the design of peer production systems that support amateur creativity.

Remixing as a Pathway to Computational Thinking

Theorists and advocates of “remixing” have suggested that appropriation can act as a pathway for learning. We test this theory quantitatively using data from more than 2.4 million multimedia programming projects shared by more than 1 million users in the Scratch online community. First, we show that users who remix more often have larger repertoires of programming commands even after controlling for the numbers of projects and amount of code shared. Second, we show that exposure to computational thinking concepts through remixing is associated with increased likelihood of using those concepts. Our results support theories that young people learn through remixing, and have important implications for designers of social computing systems.

Making Projects, Making Friends: Online Community as Catalyst for Interactive Media Creation

To become full and active participants in todays technologically saturated society, young people need to become creators (and not just consumers) of interactive media. Developing the requisite abilities and capacities is not a wholly individual process; it is important for young people to have access to communities where they can collaborate and share ideas. This article uses the Scratch online community for exploring how different forms of participation and collaboration can support and shape the ways in which young people develop as creators of interactive media. We describe participation in this community in terms of a spectrum ranging from socializing to creating and present examples of three forms of collaboration within the community. We argue that the most exciting interactive media creation and valuable learning experiences are taking place in the middle space, where participants draw on the best of socializing and creating practices.

Botivist: Calling Volunteers to Action using Online Bots

To help activists call new volunteers to action, we present Botivist: a platform that uses Twitter bots to find potential volunteers and request contributions. By leveraging different Twitter accounts, Botivist employs different strategies to encourage participation. We explore how people respond to bots calling them to action using a test case about corruption in Latin America. Our results show that the majority of volunteers (80\%) who responded to Botivists calls to action contributed relevant proposals to address the assigned social problem. Different strategies produced differences in the quantity and relevance of contributions. Some strategies that work well offline and face-to-face appeared to hinder peoples participation when used by an online bot. We analyze user behavior in response to being approached by bots with an activist purpose. We also provide strong evidence for the value of this type of civic media, and derive design implications.

Appropriation and Creativity: User-Initiated Contests in Scratch

How do people motivate each other to participate in a peer production environment? This question is addressed through the study of user-initiated contests on the electronically mediated social network that surrounds the programming language Scratch. The users of Scratch, mainly youths, have created their own mechanisms to motivate and recognize creative achievement. Some wish to achieve popularity on the site by having their project posted on the front page so contest creators offer to perform actions that will help participants reach that goal. Other contest creators, though, offer hand-made, personalized gifts such as drawings and animations made to spec. For those who offer both incentives, the ad hoc, personalized rewards are deemed more valuable than the mechanisms provided by the web site. Users are appropriating the technology, establishing their own organizational structures that encourage creativity.

The cost of collaboration for code and art: evidence from a remixing community

In this paper, we use evidence from a remixing community to evaluate two pieces of common wisdom about collaboration. First, we test the theory that jointly produced works tend to be of higher quality than individually authored products. Second, we test the theory that collaboration improves the quality of functional works like code, but that it works less well for artistic works like images and sounds. We use data from Scratch, a large online community where hundreds of thousands of young users share and remix millions of animations and interactive games. Using peer-ratings as a measure of quality, we estimate a series of fitted regression models and find that collaborative Scratch projects tend to receive ratings that are lower than individually authored works. We also find that code-intensive collaborations are rated higher than media-intensive efforts. We conclude by discussing the limitations and implications of these findings.

Calendar.help: Designing a Workflow-Based Scheduling Agent with Humans in the Loop

Although we may complain about meetings, they are an essential part of an information workers work life. Consequently, busy people spend a significant amount of time scheduling meetings. We present Calendar.help, a system that provides fast, efficient scheduling through structured workflows. Users interact with the system via email, delegating their scheduling needs to the system as if it were a human personal assistant. Common scheduling scenarios are broken down using well-defined workflows and completed as a series of microtasks that are automated when possible and executed by a human otherwise. Unusual scenarios fall back to a trained human assistant executing an unstructured macrotask. We describe the iterative approach we used to develop Calendar.help, and share the lessons learned from scheduling thousands of meetings during a year of real-world deployments. Our findings provide insight into how complex information tasks can be broken down into repeatable components that can be executed efficiently to improve productivity.