Vladimir Soroka

De-lurking in virtual communities: a social communication network approach to measuring the effects of social and cultural capital

The asymmetry of activity in virtual communities is of great interest. While participation in the activities of virtual communities is crucial for a communitys survival and development, many people prefer lurking, that is passive attention over active participation. Often, lurkers are the vast majority. There could be many reasons for lurking. Lurking can be measured and perhaps affected by both dispositional and situational variables. This project investigates social and cultural capital, situational antecedents of lurking and de-lurking. We propose a novel way of measuring such capital, lurking, and de-lurking. We try to figure out what are the triggers to active participation. We try to answer this by mathematically defining a social communication network of activities in authenticated discussion forums. Authenticated discussion forums provide exact log information about every participants activities and allow us to identify lurkers that become first time posters. The proposed social communication network approach (SCN) is an extension of the traditional social network methodology to include, beyond human actors, discussion topics (e.g. Usenet newsgroups threads) and subjects of discussions (e.g. Usenet groups) as well. In addition, the social communication network approach distinguishes between READ and POST link types. These indicate active participation on the part of the human actor. We attempt to validate this model by examining the SCN using data collected in a sample of 82 online forums. By analyzing a graph structure of the network at moments of initial postings we verify several hypotheses about causes of de-lurking and provide some directions towards measuring active participation in virtual communities.

Harvesting with SONAR: the value of aggregating social network information

Web 2.0 gives people a substantial role in content and metadata creation. New interpersonal connections are formed and existing connections become evident through Web 2.0 services. This newly created social network (SN) spans across multiple services and aggregating it could bring great value. In this work we present SONAR, an API for gathering and sharing SN information. We give a detailed description of SONAR, demonstrate its potential value through user scenarios, and show results from experiments we conducted with a SONAR-based social networking application. These suggest that aggregating SN information across diverse data sources enriches the SN picture and makes it more complete and useful for the end user.

Ask before you search: peer support and community building with reachout

This paper presents ReachOut, a chat-based tool for peer support, collaboration, and community building. We describe the philosophy behind the tool and explain how posting questions in the open directly benefits the creation, distribution, and use of organizational knowledge, in addition to enhancing the cohesion of the community involved. ReachOut proposes new methods of handling problems that include locating, selecting, and approaching the right set of potential advisers. We discuss the advantages of public discussions over private, one-on-one sessions, and how this is enhanced by our unique combination of synchronous and asynchronous communication. We present and analyze results from a pilot of ReachOut and conclude with plans for future research and development.

Invisible participants: how cultural capital relates to lurking behavior

The asymmetry of activity in virtual communities is of great interest. While participation in the activities of virtual communities is crucial for a communitys survival and development, many people prefer lurking, that is passive attention over active participation. Lurking can be measured and perhaps affected by both dispositional and situational variables. This work investigates the concept of cultural capital as situational antecedent of lurking and de-lurking (the decision to start posting after a certain amount of lurking time). Cultural capital is defined as the knowledge that enables an individual to interpret various cultural codes. The main hypothesis states that a users cultural capital affects her level of activity in a community and her decision to de-lurk and cease to exist in very active communities because of information overload. This hypothesis is analyzed by mathematically defining a social communication network (SCN) of activities in authenticated discussion forums. We validate this model by examining the SCN using data collected in a sample of 636 online forums in Open University in Israel and 2 work based communities from IBM. The hypotheses verified here make it clear that fostering receptive participation may be as important and constructive as encouraging active contributions in online communities.

Adding support for dynamic and focused search with Fetuccino

Abstract This paper proposes two enhancements to existing search services over the Web. One enhancement is the addition of limited dynamic search around results provided by regular Web search services, in order to correct part of the discrepancy between the actual Web and its static image as stored in search repositories. The second enhancement is an experimental two-phase paradigm that allows the user to distinguish between a domain query and a focused query within the dynamically identified domain. We present Fetuccino, an extension of the Mapuccino system that implements these two enhancements. Fetuccino provides an enhanced user-interface for visualization of search results, including advanced graph layout, display of structural information and support for standards (such as XML). While Fetuccino has been implemented on top of existing search services, its features could easily be integrated into any search engine for better performance. A light version of Fetuccino is available on the Internet at http://www.ibm.com/java/fetuccino.

The chasms of CSCW: a citation graph analysis of the CSCW conference

The CSCW conference is celebrating its 20th birthday. This is a perfect time to analyze the coherence of the field, to examine whether it has a solid core or sub-communities, and to identify various patterns of its development. In this paper we analyze the structure of the CSCW conference using structural analysis of the citation graph of CSCW and related publications. We identify the conferences core and most prominent clusters. We also define a measure to identify chasm-papers, namely papers cited significantly more outside the conference than within, and analyze such papers.

Livemaps for collection awareness

With the increasing proliferation of chat applications on the web, the old vision of “adding people” to the web is becoming a reality. Along with collaboration tools, more and more sites offer people awareness mechanisms to let the site visitors know about each other. This reflects the dual nature of the web as a place for virtual meetings as well as an information repository. While standalone chat tools became the killer application of the Internet, site-related awareness applications did not quite catch on. In this work, we suggest possible reasons for this phenomenon and propose a new paradigm for awareness and social navigation. We identify three main obstacles to the existing site-related awareness applications: high sensitivity to the “critical mass” requirement, inflexible meeting place granularity and poor visitor visibility. To address these issues, we extend the well-known “document awareness” concept to a more general one that we call “collection awareness”, which better reflects the graph structure of the web. We introduce a new tool for high-level awareness and collaboration, called Livemaps, which projects live information onto a web site map. We demonstrate how Livemaps addresses the obstacles we pointed out and describe a user study conducted on a “fan” web site for the “Friends” comedy series, so as to verify whether Livemaps actually improves social awareness.

Why do we ReachOut?: functions of a semi-persistent peer support tool

Collaboration plays a vital role in todays new business environment. Knowledge that resides within peoples heads has become an invaluable resource. Many formal tools, such as e-mail or teamrooms, have been introduced to support formal collaboration and have been studied extensively. However, support for informal communication is still in its infancy. Much work has been done to analyze the functions that informal communication plays in the workplace. Recently, several studies have evaluated the roles that instant messaging (IM) plays in similar settings. Research shows that in the workplace, IM is used primarily for work-related purposes and accelerates the completion of important business tasks. Clearly, new tools that combine both formal and informal interaction can bring organizations tremendous rewards. ReachOut is a tool for semi-persistent collaboration and peer support developed by the Collaboration Technologies Group at the IBM Haifa Research Lab. This paper studies the role ReachOut plays in the workplace. We analyzed the collaboration activity of the community of IBM Haifa Labs employees who used ReachOut for a period of two months. As a result, we summarize the important functions played by tools that bridge between formal and informal communication in a workplace-based community.

The diffusion of reachOut: analysis and framework for the successful diffusion of collaboration technologies

While virtual communities become more and more dominant, little attention has been directed towards understanding the conditions for creating a successful community. Significant progress has been made in understanding the diffusion of collaborative tools in the workplace. We read stories about the extraordinary success of some communities, and about the harsh failure of others. This paper argues that lessons learnt from these stories should be analyzed using the theoretical foundations of Diffusion of Innovations theories, and systematized to create a set of guidelines for community creators to make their efforts more efficient. We begin by presenting a theoretical background for analyzing technology diffusion. We then analyze the stories of diffusion of ReachOut - a tool for peer support and community building developed in our Research Lab - in two different communities, using this theory. Finally, we propose a framework for planning for successful diffusion of collaborative tools, using our experiences with ReachOut.

Pensieve: augmenting human memory

Human memory is fallible. We remember certain things, while we completely forget others. Some of the events we experience end up stored in our episodic memory, others disappear completely. Even those stored, very often remain inaccessible, since we do not have reliable mechanisms to retrieve them when required. In this paper we describe Pensieve, a system for augmenting episodic memory, that facilitates capturing of events and retrieving them later, using various relevant cues and associative browsing.