Elisabeth Joyce

Predicting Continued Participation in Newsgroups

Turnover in online communities is very high, with most people who initially post a message to an online community never contributing again. In this paper, we test whether the responses that newcomers receive to their first posts influence the extent to which they continue to participate. The data come from initial posts made by 2,777 newcomers to six public newsgroups. We coded the content and valence of the initial post and its first response, if it received one, to see if these factors influenced newcomers’ likelihood of posting again. Approximately 61% of newcomers received a reply to their initial post, and those who got a reply were 12% more likely to post to the community again; their probability of posting again increased from 44% to 56%. They were more likely to receive a response if they asked a question or wrote a longer post. Surprisingly, the quality of the response they received—its emotional tone and whether it answered a newcomer’s question—did not influence the likelihood of the newcomer’s posting again.

Don't look now, but we've created a bureaucracy: the nature and roles of policies and rules in wikipedia

Wikis are sites that support the development of emergent, collective infrastructures that are highly flexible and open, suggesting that the systems that use them will be egalitarian, free, and unstructured. Yet it is apparent that the flexible infrastructure of wikis allows the development and deployment of a wide range of structures. However, we find that the policies in Wikipedia and the systems and mechanisms that operate around them are multi-faceted. In this descriptive study, we draw on prior work on rules and policies in organizations to propose and apply a conceptual framework for understanding the natures and roles of policies in wikis. We conclude that wikis are capable of supporting a broader range of structures and activities than other collaborative platforms. Wikis allow for and, in fact, facilitate the creation of policies that serve a wide variety of functions.

Introductions and Requests: Rhetorical Strategies That Elicit Response in Online Communities

Online communities allow millions of people who would never meet in person to interact. People join web-based discussion boards, email lists, and chat rooms for friendship, social support, entertainment, and information on technical, health, and leisure activities [24]. And they do so in droves. One of the earliest networks of online communities, Usenet, had over nine million unique contributors, 250 million messages, and approximately 200,000 active groups in 2003 [27], while the newer My Space, founded in 2003, attracts a quarter million new members every day [27].

Membership Claims and Requests: Conversation-Level Newcomer Socialization Strategies in Online Groups

Early socialization experiences have a long-term impact on newcomers’ satisfaction, performance, and intention to stay in a group. We know that newcomers proactively shape their own socialization, but we know little about the behavioral tactics they employ, or how the words they choose affect their acceptance by the group. The present article highlights three common conversational strategies of newcomers to online groups: (a) group-based membership claims, in which newcomers describe initial participation in the group; (b) identity-based membership claims, in which they describe their similarity to the group’s focal social category; and (c) information requests, in which they ask for help. Using machine learning to identify these conversational strategies automatically in 12,000 newcomers’ messages to approximately 100 online groups, we find that they are correlated with increased group responsiveness. We follow this analysis with two controlled field experiments to demonstrate that when individuals attest to previous group participation and make specific requests for information, community responsiveness increases, but claims of shared identity with the group have no impact.

Rules and Roles vs. Consensus Self-Governed Deliberative Mass Collaboration Bureaucracies

Deliberative mass collaboration systems, such as Wikipedia, are characterized as undisciplined, unstructured social spaces where individuals participate in collective action. However, examination of Wikipedia reveals that it contains a bureaucratic structure, which ensures that collective goals are primary drivers of that collective action. To support large-scale activity, deliberative mass collaboration systems must provide ways of reconciling the tension between individual agency and collective goals. Wikipedia’s unusual policy, ignore all rules (IAR), serves as this tension release mechanism. IAR supports individual agency when positions taken by participants might conflict with those reflected in established rules. Hypotheses are tested with Wikipedia data regarding individual agency, bureaucratic processes, and IAR invocation during the content exclusion process. Findings indicate that in Wikipedia each utterance matters in deliberations, rules matter in deliberations, and IAR citation magnifies individual influence but also reinforces bureaucracy.

Handling flammable materials: Wikipedia biographies of living persons as contentious objects

Common ground. Shared interests. Collective goals. Much has been said about the power of technology to bring people together around commonalities to form groups, teams, and communities. Yet, the same technologies can also be used to bring together individuals with fundamentally irreconcilable differences. In these cases, the question is not how to construct systems that build on commonality, but rather how to manage artifacts that by their very nature provide affordances for conflict. In this paper we examine how Biographies of Living Persons (BLP) in Wikipedia exemplify contentious objects, both in terms of their features and their consequences. We draw from discussions of risk management and resilience to outline four approaches that groups can use to manage contentious objects (risk avoidance, risk minimization, threat reduction, and conflict management). Description of the policies, structures, and systems surrounding Biographies of Living Persons in Wikipedia illustrate how application of these approaches enable the creation and existence of large collection of contentions objects, without undermining the viability of the larger socio-technical system.

Keeping eyes on the prize: officially sanctioned rule breaking in mass collaboration systems

Mass collaboration systems are often characterized as unstructured organizations lacking rule and order. However, examination of Wikipedia reveals that it contains a complex policy and rule structure that supports the organization. Bureaucratic organizations adopt workarounds to adjust rules more accurately to the context of use. Rather than resorting to these potentially dangerous exceptions, Wikipedia has created officially sanctioned rule breaking. The use and impact of the official rule breaking policy within Wikipedia is examined to test its impact on the outcomes of requests to delete articles in from the encyclopedia. The results demonstrate that officially sanctioned rule breaking and the Ignore all rules (IAR) policy are meaningful influences on deliberation outcomes, and rather than wreaking havoc, the IAR policy in Wikipedia has been adopted as a positive, functional governance mechanism.

Overcoming transience and flux: routines in community-governed mass collaborations

Community-governed mass collaborations are virtual organizations in which volunteers self-organize to produce content of value. Given the high turnover of participants and the continual development and modification of governance modules, questions arise about how mass collaborations can succeed. Based on organizational routine theory, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how different aspects of routines can support the goals of mass collaborations.,Proposed hypotheses are developed and tested with data from a critical decision-making area of a successful community-governed mass collaboration – Wikipedia’s content review process.,The findings support the arguments that routines that reinforce governance serve important roles in enabling mass collaboration in the presence of transient participation and dynamic task demands in addition to creating a greater likelihood of success as outlined by the collaboration.,One limitation of this study is that it examines these types of routines in only one context, Wikipedia’s content review process, and Wikipedia is an unusually successful, community-governed mass collaboration. However, this can be considered a conservative test as mass collaborations in more formal contexts or in traditional organizations face fewer hurdles due to more stable social norms, routines, and participant populations.,Greater understanding of how community-governed mass collaborations “get the work done” in spite of participant transience and governance flux can guide developers in managing flourishing communities.,While routines have been studied in traditional organizations, little work has been done with routines in community-governed mass collaborations and how they enable both stability and flexibility.

Action Health Self-Efficacy Assessment Tool Development for Online Cancer Support Groups

This Work in Progress constitutes the development of an Action Health Self-Efficacy (AHSE) Assessment Tool for online cancer support groups that will permit assessment of individual AHSE while avoiding direct interventions in vulnerable communities. Benefits accrue to participants in online health support groups, but few individuals contribute even once. Those with higher levels of AHSE have been shown to persist longer and with more effort in online groups, and AHSE levels can be increased in those not demonstrating it. However, determining levels of AHSE requires direct intervention in groups. This tool for assessing AHSE supports non-invasive measurement through behavior patterns and text analysis.