Travis Kriplean

Articulations of wikiwork: uncovering valued work in wikipedia through barnstars

Successful online communities have complex cooperative arrangements, articulations of work, and integration practices. They require technical infrastructure to support a broad division of labor. Yet the research literature lacks empirical studies that detail which types of work are valued by participants in an online community. A content analysis of Wikipedia barnstars -- personalized tokens of appreciation given to participants -- reveals a wide range of valued work extending far beyond simple editing to include social support, administrative actions, and types of articulation work. Our analysis develops a theoretical lens for understanding how wiki software supports the creation of articulations of work. We give implications of our results for communities engaged in large-scale collaborations.

Supporting reflective public thought with considerit

We present a novel platform for supporting public deliberation on difficult decisions. ConsiderIt guides people to reflect on tradeoffs and the perspectives of others by framing interactions around pro/con points that participants create, adopt, and share. ConsiderIt surfaces the most salient pros and cons overall, while also enabling users to drill down into the key points for different groups. We deployed ConsiderIt in a contentious U.S. state election, inviting residents to deliberate on nine ballot measures. We discuss ConsiderIts affordances and limitations, enriched with empirical data from this deployment. We show that users often engaged in normatively desirable activities, such as crafting positions that recognize both pros and cons, as well as points written by people who do not agree with them.

Community, consensus, coercion, control: cs*w or how policy mediates mass participation

When large groups cooperate, issues of conflict and control surface because of differences in perspective. Managing such diverse views is a persistent problem in cooperative group work. The Wikipedian community has responded with an evolving body of policies that provide shared principles, processes, and strategies for collaboration. We employ a grounded approach to study a sample of active talk pages and examine how policies are employed as contributors work towards consensus. Although policies help build a stronger community, we find that ambiguities in policies give rise to power plays. This lens demonstrates that support for mass collaboration must take into account policy and power.

Utility of human-computer interactions: toward a science of preference measurement

The success of a computer system depends upon a user choosing it, but the field of Human-Computer Interaction has little ability to predict this user choice. We present a new method that measures user choice, and quantifies it as a measure of utility. Our method has two core features. First, it introduces an economic definition of utility, one that we can operationalize through economic experiments. Second, we employ a novel method of crowdsourcing that enables the collection of thousands of economic judgments from real users.

Is this what you meant?: promoting listening on the web with reflect

A lack of support for active listening undermines discussion and deliberation on the web. We contribute a design frame identifying potential improvements to web discussion were listening more explicitly encouraged in interfaces. We explore these concepts through a novel interface, Reflect, that creates a space next to every comment where others can summarize the points they hear the commenter making. Deployments on Slashdot, Wikimedias Strategic Planning Initiative, and a local civic effort suggest that interfaces for listening may have traction for general use on the web.

Bursting your (filter) bubble: strategies for promoting diverse exposure

Broadcast media are declining in their power to decide which issues and viewpoints will reach large audiences. But new information filters are appearing, in the guise of recommender systems, aggregators, search engines, feed ranking algorithms, and the sites we bookmark and the people and organizations we choose to follow on Twitter. Sometimes we explicitly choose our filters; some we hardly even notice. Critics worry that, collectively, these filters will isolate people in information bubbles only partly of their own choosing, and that the inaccurate beliefs they form as a result may be difficult to correct. But should we really be worried, and, if so, what can we do about it? Our panelists will review what scholars know about selectivity of exposure preferences and actual exposure and what we in the CSCW field can do to develop and test ways of promoting diverse exposure, openness to the diversity we actually encounter, and deliberative discussion.

Facilitating Diverse Political Engagement with the Living Voters Guide

ABSTRACT Unlike 20th-century mass media, the Internet requires self-selection of content by its very nature. This has raised the normative concern that users may opt to encounter only political information and perspectives that accord with their pre-existing views. This study examines the different ways that voters appropriated a new, purpose-built online engagement platform to engage with a wide variety of political opinions and arguments. In a system aimed at helping Washington state citizens make their 2010 election decisions, we find that users take significant advantage of three key opportunities to engage with political diversity: accessing, considering, and producing arguments on both sides of various policy proposals. Notably, engagement with each of these forms of participation drops off as the required level of commitment increases. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results as well as directions for future research.

Integrating on-demand fact-checking with public dialogue

Public dialogue plays a key role in democratic society. Such dialogue often contains factual claims, but participants and readers are left wondering what to believe, particularly when contributions to such dialogue come from a broad spectrum of the public. We explore the design space for introducing authoritative information into public dialogue, with the goal of supporting constructive rather than confrontational discourse. We also present a specific design and realization of an archetypal sociotechnical system of this kind, namely an on-demand fact-checking service integrated into a crowdsourced voters guide powered by deliberating citizens. The fact-checking service was co-designed with and staffed by professional librarians. Our evaluation examines the service from the perspectives of both users and librarians.

Collaborative sensemaking during admin permission granting in wikipedia

A self-governed, open contributor system such as Wikipedia depends upon those who are invested in the system to participate as administrators. Processes for selecting which system contributors will be allowed to assume administrative roles in such communities have developed in the last few years as these systems mature. However, little is yet known about such processes, which are becoming increasingly important for the health and maintenance of contributor systems that are becoming increasingly important in the knowledge economy. This paper reports the results of an exploratory study of how members of the Wikipedia community engage in collaborative sensemaking when deciding which members to advance to admin status.

Public participation and value advocacy in information design and sharing: Laying the foundations in advance of wide-scale public deployment

Supporting public participation is often a key goal in the design of digital government systems. However, years of work may be required before a complex system, such as the UrbanSim urban simulation system, is deployed and ready for such participation. In this paper, we investigate laying the foundations for public participation in information design and sharing in advance of wide-scale public deployment, with the goal of having interaction designs ready when the system is put into such use. Moreover, in a highly politicized domain such as this one, value advocacy as well as factual information plays a central role. Using the theory and methods of Value Sensitive Design, we address three design goals toward public participation and value advocacy, and provide evidence that each of them was achieved: (1) enabling indirect stakeholders to become direct stakeholders (i.e. enabling more people to interact directly with UrbanSim in useful ways); (2) developing a participatory process by which these stakeholders can help guide the development of the system itself; and (3) enabling participating organizations to engage in value advocacy while at the same time enhancing overall system legitimation.