Christopher Phethean

Rethinking measurements of social media use by charities: a mixed methods approach

Increasingly, the utilisation of social media services are helping charities continue to operate, as they provide unique opportunities of low-cost, easily targeted and viral marketing that have never been seen before to this scale. However, without knowing exactly how and why they are being used, analysis of their performance that could be used to indicate areas of improvement will continue to be insufficient. An innovative mixed methods approach was followed in order to address the issue, and this paper presents the results of a study that sought to determine the reasons why charities use social media, and the strategies they employ in an attempt to succeed. Three main contributions are presented -- firstly, by combining the qualitative and quantitative data it was discovered that social media are currently intended to be used primarily as relationship building tools, with little focus on fundraising; secondly, an overview of how successful charities perceive social media to be is shown and methods of measurement are mapped to a previously designed framework; and thirdly, future requirements for revising the measurement framework are discussed, demonstrating the importance of this work for grounding future developments.

The Role of Data Science in Web Science

Web science relies on an interdisciplinary approach that seeks to go beyond what any one subject can say about the World Wide Web. By incorporating numerous disciplinary perspectives and relying heavily on domain knowledge and expertise, data science has emerged as an important new area that integrates statistics with computational knowledge, data collection, cleaning and processing, analysis methods, and visualization to produce actionable insights from big data. As a discipline to use within Web science research, data science offers significant opportunities for uncovering trends in large Web-based datasets. A Web science observatory exemplifies this relationship by offering an online platform of tools for carrying out Web science research, allowing users to carry out data science techniques to produce insights into Web science issues such as community development, online behavior, and information propagation. The authors outline the similarities and differences of these two growing subject areas to demonstrate the important relationship developing between them.

Wikidatians are born: paths to full participation in a collaborative structured knowledge base

We investigated how participation evolves in Wiki- data as its editors become established members of the community. Originally conceived to support Wikipedia, Wikidata is a collaborative structured knowledge base, created and maintained by a large number of volunteers, whose data can be freely reused in other contexts. Just like in any other online social environment, understanding its contributors’ pathways to full participation helps Wikidata improve user experience and retention. We analysed how participation changes in time under the frameworks of legitimate peripheral participation and activity theory. We found out that as they engage more with the project, “Wikidatians” acquire a higher sense of responsibility for their work, interact more with the community, take on more advanced tasks, and use a wider range of tools. Previous activity in Wikipedia has varied effects. As Wikidata is a young community, future work should focus on volunteers with little or no expe- rience in similar projects and specify means to improve critical aspects such as engagement and data quality.

Assessing the Value of Social Media for Organisations: The Case for Charitable Use

Social media offer opportunities for organisations of all sectors to communicate with their audiences. There is little understanding, however, of what value these services actually provide for many of these organisations. Focusing on the charitable sector, this paper brings together the results of a number of studies into a triangulation whose own results and findings are discussed, and an overall model of value assessment for social media is presented. Emphasis is placed on eliciting the motivations and aims of both the charity and their supporters, along with observing the actual behaviour that then occurs from each side. By comparing these phenomena, and appreciating how they all interact with each other, it is argued that greater understanding around how valuable a particular organisation will find social media can be obtained.

Engaging with charities on social media: comparing interaction on Facebook and Twitter

Social media are commonly assumed to provide fruitful online communities for organisations, whereby the brand and supporter-base engage in productive, two-way conversations. For charities, this provides a unique opportunity to reach an audience for a relatively low cost, yet some remain hesitant to fully embrace these services without knowing exactly what they will receive in return. This paper reports on a study that seeks to determine the extent to which these conversations occur, and compares this phenomenon on Facebook and Twitter for a sample of UK-based charities. Focus was placed on analysing conversations as signs of developing relationships, which have previously been shown to be a key target for charities on social media. The results of this study find that while there is an expected proportion of the audience who prefer to listen rather than engage, there is strong evidence of a core group of supporters on each site who repeatedly engage. Interestingly, disparities between how this occurs on Facebook and Twitter emerge, with the results suggesting that Facebook receives more conversations in response to the charities’ own posts, whereas on Twitter there is a larger observable element of unsolicited messages of people talking about the charity, which in turn produces a differing opportunity for the charity to extract value from the network. It is also found that posts containing pictures receive the highest number of responses on each site. These were a lot less common on Twitter and could therefore offer an avenue for charities to increase the frequency of responses they achieve.

Is Virtual Citizen Science A Game

The use of game elements within virtual citizen science is increasingly common, promising to bring increased user activity, motivation, and engagement to large-scale scientific projects. However, there is an ongoing debate about whether or not gamifying systems such as these is actually an effective means by which to increase motivation and engagement in the long term. While gamification itself is receiving a large amount of attention, there has been little beyond individual studies to assess its suitability or success for citizen science; similarly, while frameworks exist for assessing citizen science performance, they tend to lack any appreciation of the effects that game elements might have had. We therefore review the literature to determine what the trends are regarding the performance of particular game elements or characteristics in citizen science, and survey existing projects to assess how popular different game features are. Investigating this phenomenon further, we then present the results of a series of interviews carried out with the EyeWire citizen science project team to understand more about how gamification elements are introduced, monitored, and assessed in a live project. Our findings suggest that projects use a range of game elements with points and leaderboards the most popular, particularly in projects that describe themselves as “games.” Currently, gamification appears to be effective in citizen science for maintaining engagement with existing communities, but shows limited impact for attracting new players.

What Makes a Good Collaborative Knowledge Graph: Group Composition and Quality in Wikidata

Wikidata is a community-driven knowledge graph which has drawn much attention from researchers and practitioners since its inception in 2012. The large user pool behind this project has been able to produce information spanning over several domains, which is openly released and can be reused to feed any information-based application. Collaborative production processes in Wikidata have not yet been explored. Understanding them is key to prevent potentially harmful community dynamics and ensure the sustainability of the project in the long run. We performed a regression analysis to investigate how the contribution of different types of users, i.e. bots and human editors, registered or anonymous, influences outcome quality in Wikidata. Moreover, we looked at the effects of tenure and interest diversity among registered users. Our findings show that a balanced contribution of bots and human editors positively influence outcome quality, whereas higher numbers of anonymous edits may hinder performance. Tenure and interest diversity within groups also lead to higher quality. These results may be helpful to identify and address groups that are likely to underperform in Wikidata. Further work should analyse in detail the respective contributions of bots and registered users.

Designing and Delivering a Curriculum for Data Science Education Across Europe

Data is currently being produced at an incredible rate globally, fuelled by the increasing ubiquity of the Web, and stoked by social media, sensors, and mobile devices. However, as the amount of available data continues to increase, so does the demand for professionals who have the necessary skills to manage and manipulate this data. This paper presents the European Data Science Academy (EDSA), an initiative for bridging the data science skills gap across Europe and training a new generation of world-leading data scientists. The EDSA project has established a rigorous process and a set of best practices for the production and delivery of curricula for data science. Additionally, the project’s efforts are dedicated to linking the demand for data science skills with the supply of learning resources that offer these skills. In order to achieve this, EDSA is offering interactive tools for finding learning resources and building personalised learning pathways towards acquiring the skills that are currently in demand.

What do Wikidata and Wikipedia Have in Common?: An Analysis of their Use of External References

Wikidata is a community-driven knowledge graph, strongly linked to Wikipedia. However, the connection between the two projects has been sporadically explored. We investigated the relationship between the two projects in terms of the information they contain by looking at their external references. Our findings show that while only a small number of sources is directly reused across Wikidata and Wikipedia, references often point to the same domain. Furthermore, Wikidata appears to use less Anglo-American-centred sources. These results deserve further in-depth investigation.