Realistic practice and tailored feedback are key processes for training peer counselors with clinical skills.However, existing mechanisms of providing feedback largely rely on human supervision.Peer counselors often lack mechanisms to receive detailed feedback from experienced mentors, making it difficult for them to support the large number of people with mental health issues who use peer counseling.Our work aims to leverage large language models to provide contextualized and multi-level feedback to empower peer counselors, especially novices, at scale.To achieve this, we co-design with a group of senior psychotherapy supervisors to develop a multi-level feedback taxonomy, and then construct a publicly available dataset with comprehensive feedback annotations of 400 emotional support conversations.We further design a self-improvement method on top of large language models to enhance the automatic generation of feedback.Via qualitative and quantitative evaluation with domain experts, we demonstrate that our method minimizes the risk of potentially harmful and lowquality feedback generation which is desirable in such high-stakes scenarios.

Online platforms provide support for many kinds of distress, including suicidal thoughts and behaviors. However, because many platforms restrict suicidal talk, volunteers on these platforms struggle with how to help suicidal people who come for support. We interviewed 11 volunteer counselors in a large online support platform, including after they role-played conversations with varying severities of suicidality, to explore practices and challenges when identifying and responding to suicidality. We then presented Speed Dating design concepts around emotional preparation and support, real-time guidance, training, and suicide detection. Participants wanted more support and preparation for conversations with suicidal people, but were conflicted about AI-based technologies, including trade-offs between potential benefits of conversational agents for training and limitations of prediction or real-time response suggestions, due to the sensitive, context-dependent decisions that volunteers must make. Our work has important implications for nuanced considerations and design choices around developing digital mental health technologies.

Interpersonal conflicts occur frequently in both offline and online groups, with conditions for conflict especially ripe online. This research attempts to understand the consequences of online group conflict and reporting it to group administrators, both for the protagonists in the conflict and observers. If group conflict is aversive, then group members should reduce their group participation after observing conflict. Theories of imitation and behavioral mimicry suggest that even onlookers will exhibit more conflict and negative language after observing conflict conversations in their group. In contrast, theories of deterrence suggest that both the instigator of the conflict and onlookers will reduce their conflict and onlookers might even increase their engagement if conflicts are reported to group administrators. The current study uses de-identified and aggregated data from Facebook group conversations and Mahalanobis distance matching to test these ideas. Results are consistent with the hypothesis that conflict in group conversations reduces engagement within the group and increases the amount of conflict and the negativity of language users express in the group. However, inconsistent with deterrence theories, conflict and language negativity increase and group engagement decreases when conflict is reported to group administrators.

Online mental health support communities, in which volunteer counselors provide accessible mental and emotional health support, have grown in recent years. Despite millions of people using these platforms, the clinical effectiveness of these communities on mental health symptoms remains unknown. Although volunteers receive some training on the therapeutic skills proven effective in face-to-face environments, such as active listening and motivational interviewing, it is unclear how the usage of these skills in an online context affects people's mental health. In our work, we collaborate with one of the largest online peer support platforms and use both natural language processing and machine learning techniques to examine how one-on-one support chats on the platform affect clients' depression and anxiety symptoms. We measure how characteristics of support-providers, such as their experience on the platform and use of therapeutic skills (e.g. affirmation, showing empathy), affect support-seekers' mental health changes. Based on a propensity-score matching analysis to approximate a random-assignment experiment, results shows that online peer support chats improve both depression and anxiety symptoms with a statistically significant but relatively small effect size. Additionally, support providers' techniques such as emphasizing the autonomy of the client lead to better mental health outcomes. However, we also found that the use of some behaviors, such as persuading and providing information, are associated with worsening of mental health symptoms. Our work provides key understanding for mental health care in the online setting and designing training systems for online support providers.

Wikipedia has been the poster child for large-scale online open collaboration while few other online open collaboration initiatives have achieved similar success. How did Wikipedians do it? Besides the technical infrastructure, what social dynamics and processes are critical to its success? This essay reviews 217 articles that examined aspects of the behaviors of Wikipedia editors and the processes through which they coordinate and collaborate. Using the Input-Mediator-Output-Input model (IMOI) as the organizing framework, we summarized the key insights in an integrative review. The input factors include editors, their motivations, and the tools they use to support their work. The mediating factors include coordination, governance, leadership, conflict, newcomer socialization, and roles. The outcome focuses on measuring and predicting contribution quantity and quality. We hope our work serves as a road map for researchers who are interested in Wikipedia to learn about prior research and identify future research directions.

What people see on social media influences their affective state. Predictions of the affective reaction of an audience to a post could help posters creating content and viewers searching for it. This paper examines the value of both real comments and artificially generated ones in predicting the affective responses of an audience. We built an affect prediction model based on Facebook anonymized public posts to predict affective responses (anger, amusement, and sadness affect) as indicated by three Facebook reaction clicks (Angry, Haha, and Sad). Using the content of the original post can predict reactions well (.71 to.87 F1-scores). Adding the text of real post comments improves F1-score by up to 11%. Surprisingly, generated comments improve predictions as much as real comments. These artificial comments were produced using a pre-trained sequence-to-sequence, BART natural language generation model given a post as input. Using artificial comments means that one can predict affect reactions early in the history of a discussion, before anyone has actually commented on a post.

Experiential training, where mental health professionals practice their learned skills, remains the most costly component of therapeutic training. We introduce Pin-MI, a video-call-based tool that supports experiential learning of counseling skills used in motivational interviewing (MI)through interactive role-play as client and counselor. In Pin-MI, counselors annotate, or “pin” the important moments in their role-play sessions in real-time. The pins are then used post-session to facilitate a reflective learning process, in which both client and counselor can provide feedback about what went well or poorly during each pinned moment. We discuss the design of Pin-MI and a qualitative evaluation with a set of healthcare professionals learning MI. Our evaluation suggests that Pin-MI helped users develop empathy, be more aware of their skill usage, guaranteed immediate and targeted feedback, and helped users correct misconceptions about their performance. We discuss implications for the design of experiential training tools for learning counseling skills.

Extensive research has been published on the conversational factors of effective volunteer peer counseling on online mental health platforms (OMHPs). However, studies differ in how they define and measure success outcomes, with most prior work examining only a single success metric. In this work, we model the relationship between previously reported linguistic predictors of effective counseling with four outcomes following a peer-to-peer session on a single OMHP: retention in the community, following up on a previous session with a counselor, users’ evaluation of a counselor, and changes in users’ mood. Results show that predictors correlate negatively with community retention but positively with users following up with and giving higher evaluations to individual counselors. We suggest actionable insights for therapy platform design and outcome measurement based on findings that the relationship between predictors and outcomes of successful conversations depends on differences in measurement construct and operationalization.

With the rise of social media, users from across the world are able to connect and converse with each other online. While these connections have facilitated a growth in knowledge, online discussions can also end in acrimonious conflict. Previous computational studies have focused on creating online conflict detection models from inferred labels, primarily examine disagreement but not acrimony, and do not examine the conflict’s emergence. Social science studies have investigated offline conflict, which can differ from its online form, and rarely examines its emergence. The current research aims to understand how online conflicts arise in online personal conversations. Our ground truth is a Facebook tool that allows group members to report conflict to administrators. We contrast discussions ending with a conflict report with paired non-conflict discussions from the same post. We study both user characteristics (e.g., historical user-to-user interactions) and conversation dynamics (e.g., changes in emotional intensity over the course of the conversation). We use logistic regression to identify the features that predict conflict. User characteristics such as the commenter’s gender and previous involvement in negative online activity are strong indicators of conflict. Conversational dynamics, such as an increase in person-oriented discussion, are also important signals of conflict. These results help us understand how conflicts emerge and suggest better detection models and ways to alert group administrators and members early on to mediate the conversation.

A sense of community is important in encouraging people to contribute to a variety of causes and the communities that support them. Researchers have identified website design features that can engender a sense of community on sites to promote contributions. However, most findings about design features are based on observational empirical research testing single features at a time or on standard practice and rarely use integrated theories to provide rationale for their design suggestions. This work investigates ways to re-design an entire website---with a simulated medical crowdfunding interface entitled Community Journey---informed by Sense of Community Theory to increase site visitors' sense of community and contributions. A between-subjects experiment revealed that the Community Journey interface increased potential supporters' sense of community and their overall willingness to contribute via monetary donations, campaign shares, personal messages, and offline support. Think-aloud interviews identified the interface features responsible for the overall increase in willingness to contribute. Finally, we suggest theory driven design implications for creating websites to build a strong support community and to encourage various contributions.

Millions of people participate in online peer-to-peer support sessions, yet there has been little prior research on systematic psychology-based evaluations of fine-grained peer-counselor behavior in relation to client satisfaction. This paper seeks to bridge this gap by mapping peer-counselor chat-messages to motivational interviewing (MI) techniques. We annotate 14,797 utterances from 734 chat conversations using 17 MI techniques and introduce four new interviewing codes such as ''chit-chat'' and ''inappropriate'' to account for the unique conversational patterns observed on online platforms. We automate the process of labeling peer-counselor responses to MI techniques by fine-tuning large domain-specific language models and then use these automated measures to investigate the behavior of the peer counselors via correlational studies. Specifically, we study the impact of MI techniques on the conversation ratings to investigate the techniques that predict clients' satisfaction with their counseling sessions. When counselors use techniques such as reflection and affirmation, clients are more satisfied. Examining volunteer counselors' change in usage of techniques suggest that counselors learn to use more introduction and open questions as they gain experience. This work provides a deeper understanding of the use of motivational interviewing techniques on peer-to-peer counselor platforms and sheds light on how to build better training programs for volunteer counselors on online platforms.

Online peer-to-peer therapy sessions can be effective in improving people's mental well-being. However, online volunteer counselors may lack the expertise and necessary training to provide high-quality sessions, and these low-quality sessions may negatively impact volunteers' motivations as well as clients' well-being. This paper uses interviews with 20 senior online volunteer counselors to examine how they addressed challenges and acquired skills when volunteering in a large, mental-health support community - 7Cups.com. Although volunteers in this community received some training based on principles of active listening and motivational interviewing, results indicate that the training was insufficient and that volunteer counselors had to independently develop strategies to deal with specific challenges that they encountered in their volunteer work. Their strategies, however, might deviate from standard practice since they generally lacked systematic feedback from mentors or clients and, instead, relied on their personal experiences. Additionally, volunteer counselors reported having difficulty maintaining their professional boundaries with the clients. Even though training and support resources were available, they were underutilized. The results of this study have uncovered new design spaces for HCI practitioners and researchers, including social computing and artificial intelligence approaches that may provide better support to volunteer counselors in online mental health communities.

People with mental distress are increasingly turning to one-to-one synchronous communication websites to receive peer support from other members. Though some research has identified benefits and challenges of online peer-support, there is a limited understanding of how to best prepare and scaffold for untrained peer supporters as they attempt to become skillful in an online setting. We recruited 30 (15 pairs) participants to engage in an online support conversation about procrastination problems, gave one member of each pair minimal training in the principles and strategies of motivational interviewing, and used interviews and conversation transcripts to examine challenges novice helpers faced when providing support and learning new conversational skills. We presented the helpers with two conversation goals to achieve with the conversation: building understanding, and promoting readiness for change. The research identified the common strategies the helpers used to achieve these goals and the challenges they faced. We also discuss theoretical and design implications for platform designers to better scaffold this experience.

The individualistic nature of gig work allows workers to have high levels of flexibility, but it also leads to atomization, leaving them isolated from peer workers. In this paper, we employed a qualitative approach to understand how online social media groups provide informational and emotional support to physical gig workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that social media groups alleviate the atomization effect, as workers use these groups to obtain experiential knowledge from their peers, build connections, and organize collective action. However, we noted a reluctance among workers to share strategic information where there was a perceived risk of being competitively disadvantaged. In addition, we found that the diversity among gig workers has also led to limited empathy for one another, which further impedes the provision of emotional support. While social media groups could potentially become places where workers organize collective efforts, several factors, including the uncertainty of other workers' activities and the understanding of the independent contractor status, have diminished the effectiveness of efforts at collective action.

Online health communities (OHCs) have become important resources from which members can obtain social support. Since most benefits of OHCs are provided by its members, it is crucial that OHCs maintain a critical mass of active members. This paper examines temporal changes in members' participation in a cancer-orientedOHC, focusing on the changes in members' motivations and behavior as they transition from newcomers to other roles or when they ultimately leave the community. Our work used mixed methods, combining behavioral log analysis, automated content analysis, surveys and interviews. We found that shifts in members' motivations seemed to be driven by two sources: the internal dynamics common to becoming a member of most online communities and the external needs associated with their cancer journey. When members' disease-driven needs for support decreased, most members quit the site. The motivations of those who stayed shifted from receiving support to providing it to others in the community. As in many online communities, old-timers contributed the vast majority of content. However, they encountered challenges that threatened their commitment, including negative emotions related to other members' deaths, which led them to take leaves of absence from the community or to drop out permanently. Implications for the motivation changes ofOHC members are discussed.

Attracting and retaining newcomers is critical and challenging for online production communities such as Wikipedia, both because volunteers need specialized training and are likely to leave before being integrated into the community. In response to these challenges, the Wikimedia Foundation started the Wiki Education Project (Wiki Ed), an online program in which college students edit Wikipedia articles as class assignments. The Wiki Ed program incorporates many components of institutional socialization, a process many conventional organizations successfully use to integrate new employees through formalized on-boarding practices. Research has not adequately investigated whether Wiki Ed and similar programs are effective ways to integrate volunteers in online communities, and, if so, the mechanisms involved. This paper evaluates the Wiki Ed program by comparing 16,819 student editors in 770 Wiki Ed classes with new editors who joined Wikipedia in the conventional way. The evaluation shows that the Wiki Ed students did more work, improved articles more, and were more committed to Wikipedia. For example, compared to new editors who joined Wikipedia in the conventional way they were twice as likely to still be editing Wikipedia a year after their Wiki Ed class was finished. Further, students in classrooms that encouraged joint activity, a key component of institutional socialization, produced better quality work than those in classrooms where students worked independently. These findings are consistent with an interpretation that the Wiki Ed program was successful because it incorporated elements of institutionalized socialization.

Although people frequently seek mentoring or advice for their career, most mentoring is performed in person. Little research has examined the nature and quality of career mentoring online. To address this gap, we study how people use online Q&A forums for career advice. We develop a taxonomy of career advice requests based on a qualitative analysis of posts in a career-related online forum, identifying three key types: best practices, career threats, and time-sensitive requests. Our quantitative analysis of responses shows that both requesters and external viewers value general information, encouragement, and guidance, but not role modeling. We found no relation between the type of requests and features of responses, nor differences in responses valued by requesters versus external viewers. We present design recommendations for supporting online career advice exchange.

Participants in online communities often enact different roles when participating in their communities. For example, some in cancer support communities specialize in providing disease-related information or socializing new members. This work clusters the behavioral patterns of users of a cancer support community into specific functional roles. Based on a series of quantitative and qualitative evaluations, this research identified eleven roles that members occupy, such as welcomer and story sharer. We investigated role dynamics, including how roles change over members' lifecycles, and how roles predict long-term participation in the community. We found that members frequently change roles over their history, from ones that seek resources to ones offering help, while the distribution of roles is stable over the community's history. Adopting certain roles early on predicts members' continued participation in the community. Our methodology will be useful for facilitating better use of members' skills and interests in support of community-building efforts.

People with health concerns go to online health support groups to obtain help and advice. To do so, they frequently disclose personal details, many times in public. Although research in non-health settings suggests that people self-disclose less in public than in private, this pattern may not apply to health support groups where people want to get relevant help. Our work examines how the use of private and public channels influences members' self-disclosure in an online cancer support group, and how channels moderate the influence of self-disclosure on reciprocity and receiving support. By automatically measuring people's self-disclosure at scale, we found that members of cancer support groups revealed more negative self-disclosure in the public channels compared to the private channels. Although one's self-disclosure leads others to self-disclose and to provide support, these effects were generally stronger in the private channel. These channel effects probably occur because the public channels are the primary venue for support exchange, while the private channels are mainly used for follow-up conversations. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of our work.

In many teams, members play distinct roles, from leader to disrupter to social networker. Understanding the roles that contributors enact in micro-lending platforms is both psychologically and socially important for sustaining members' motivation and coordinating their joint efforts. Knowing what roles exist in these communities or which additional ones might be needed can also help teams function more effectively. In this paper, we identify social roles in Kiva.org, a peer-to-peer micro-funding platform, by utilizing members' lending behaviors, social network behaviors and communication behaviors to model their social roles at three levels. At the individual level, this method discovered active lenders who made many loans, early-bird lenders who made loans well before deadlines, and lurkers who rarely lent. At the topical level, our method differentiated those who had broad interests and lent to many causes from those who made loans only to borrowers in certain geographic regions or industry sectors. At the team level, the method revealed eight team-oriented functional roles such as encouragers, reminders, competitors, followers, and welcomers. To demonstrate the utility of the team roles, we used regression analysis to show how the distribution of social roles within teams influences the amount of money teams lent. Implications for identifying roles and understanding their contributions to teams are discussed.

For online communities to be successful, they must retain an adequate number of members who contribute to the community. The amount and type of communication members receive can play an important role in generating and sustaining members' commitment to it. However, the communication that members find valuable may change with their tenure in the community. This paper examines how the communication members receive in an health-support community influences their commitment and how this influence changes with their tenure in the community. Commitment was operationalized with three measures: self-reported attachment, continued participation in the community, and responding to others. Results show that receiving communication was generally associated with increased commitment across the three measures, with its impact increasing with members' tenure. However, the average amount of informational and emotional support members received per message was associated with decreased commitment. Results have implications for interventions to encourage members' commitment to their communities throughout their history in the community.

Forming work teams involves matching people with complementary skills and personalities, but requires obtaining such data a priori. We introduce team dating, where people interact on brief tasks before working with a dedicated partner for longer, more complex tasks. We studied team dating through two online experiments. In Experiment 1, workers from a crowd platform independently wrote an ad slogan, discussed it with three consecutive people and evaluated their team date interactions. They then selected preferred teammates from a list showing average ratings for people they had dated and not dated. Results show that participants evaluated their dates based on evidence beyond externally judged slogan quality, and relied heavily on their dyad-specific judgments in selecting teammates. In Experiment 2, we replicated the individual and team dating tasks, and formed teams, either i) by honoring pairwise team dating preferences, ii) randomly from their pool of dates, or iii) randomly from those not dated. Results show that teams formed from preferred dates performed better on a final creative task compared to random dates or non-dates. Team dating provides a dynamic technique for forming ad hoc teams accounting for interpersonal dynamics. The initial interactions provided information that helped people select and work with an appropriate teammate.

Online communities have the potential to be supportive, cruel, or anywhere in between. The development of positive norms for interaction can help users build bonds, grow, and learn. Using millions of messages sent in Twitch chatrooms, we explore the effectiveness of methods for encouraging and discouraging specific behaviors, including taking advantage of imitation effects through setting positive examples and using moderation tools to discourage antisocial behaviors. Consistent with aspects of imitation theory and deterrence theory, users imitated examples of behavior that they saw, and more so for behaviors from high status users. Proactive moderation tools, such as chat modes which restricted the ability to post certain content, proved effective at discouraging spam behaviors, while reactive bans were able to discourage a wider variety of behaviors. This work considers the intersection of tools, authority, and types of behaviors, offering a new frame through which to consider the development of moderation strategies.

Most studies on human editing focus merely on syntactic revision operations, failing to capture the intentions behind revision changes, which are essential for facilitating the single and collaborative writing process.In this work, we develop in collaboration with Wikipedia editors a 13-category taxonomy of the semantic intention behind edits in Wikipedia articles.Using labeled article edits, we build a computational classifier of intentions that achieved a micro-averaged F1 score of 0.621.We use this model to investigate edit intention effectiveness: how different types of edits predict the retention of newcomers and changes in the quality of articles, two key concerns for Wikipedia today.Our analysis shows that the types of edits that users make in their first session predict their subsequent survival as Wikipedia editors, and articles in different stages need different types of edits.

Dual processing theories in psychology suggest that people process persuasive requests by assessing the quality of arguments (systematic processing) or by relying on heuristic rules (heuristic processing). However, the factors that act as systematic and heuristic processing cues and affect the success of persuasion have not been adequately described in social lending contexts. This research examines the effectiveness of systematic and heuristic cues in persuasive requests in Kiva lending teams intended to convince members to donate. An analysis of 88,596 requests exchanged in 1,610 teams shows that certain heuristic processing cues (e.g., liking between requesters and potential lenders, advocates low authority in their teams and the importance of the team to the lender) strongly predicted whether lenders would contribute to a loan request. In contrast, cues that required systematic processing are less influential. We also found that behavioral cues are more important than verbal ones. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our work.

People often try to impress their friends online, but we don't know how well they do it or what they talk about to try to make themselves look good. In the face of known egocentric biases, which cause communicators to overestimate the extent that audiences will understand the intent of their messages, and self-enhancement biases, that cause people to overvalue their own behavior, it is likely that many self-presentation attempts will often fail. However, we don't know which topics cause such failure. In an empirical study, 1300 Facebook users evaluated their most recent status update in terms of how good it make them look. In addition external judges also evaluated the same update. Posters and outsiders agreed only modestly about how good an update made the poster appear (r=.36, p<.001). Posters generally thought that their posts make them look better than did the outsider judges. They also disagreed on which topics made them look good. Posters were especially likely to overestimate their self-presentation when they wrote about the mundane details of their daily life (e.g., Clothing, Sleep, or Religious imagery), but underestimated it when they wrote about family and relationships (e.g., Birthday, Father's Day, Love).

Friendsourcing consists of broadcasting questions and help requests to friends on social networking sites. Despite its potential value, friendsourcing requests often fall on deaf ears. One way to improve response rates and motivate friends to undertake more effortful tasks may be to offer extrinsic rewards, such as money or a gift, for responding to friendsourcing requests. However, past research suggests that these extrinsic rewards can have unintended consequences, including undermining intrinsic motivations and undercutting the relationship between people. To explore the effects of extrinsic reward on friends' response rate and perceived relationship, we conducted an experiment on a new friendsourcing platform - Mobilyzr. Results indicate that large extrinsic rewards increase friends' response rates without reducing the relationship strength between friends. Additionally, the extrinsic rewards allow requesters to explain away the failure of friendsourcing requests and thus preserve their perceptions of relationship ties with friends.

Social networking sites (SNSs) offer users a platform to build and maintain social connections. Understanding when people feel comfortable sharing information about themselves on SNSs is critical to a good user experience, because self-disclosure helps maintain friendships and increase relationship closeness. This observational research develops a machine learning model to measure self-disclosure in SNSs and uses it to understand the contexts where it is higher or lower. Features include emotional valence, social distance between the poster and people mentioned in the post, the language similarity between the post and the community and post topic. To validate the model and advance our understanding about online self-disclosure, we applied it to de-identified, aggregated status updates from Facebook users. Results show that women self-disclose more than men. People with a stronger desire to manage impressions self-disclose less. Network size is negatively associated with self-disclosure, while tie strength and network density are positively associated.

People are more creative at solving difficult design problems when they use relevant examples from outside of the problem's domain as inspirations. However, finding such “outside-the-box” inspirations is difficult, particularly in large idea repositories such as the web, because without guidance people select domains to search based on surface similarity to the problem's domain. In this paper, we demonstrate an approach in which non-experts identify domains that have the potential to yield useful and non-obvious inspirations for solutions. We report an empirical study demonstrating how crowds can generate domains of expertise and that showing people an abstract representation rather than the original problem helps them identify more distant domains. Crowd workers drawing inspirations from the distant domains produced more creative solutions to the original problem than did those who sought inspiration on their own, or drew inspiration from domains closer to or not sharing structural correspondence with the original problem.

Previous work has shown the promise of crowdsourcing analogical idea generation, where distributing the stages of analogical processing across many people can reduce fixation, identify inspirations from more diverse domains, and lead to more creative ideas. However, prior work has only considered problems with a single constraint, while many real-world problems involve multiple constraints. This paper contributes a systematic crowdsourcing approach for eliciting multiple constraints inherent in a problem and using those constraints to find inspirations useful in solving it. To do so we identify methods to elicit useful constraints at different levels of abstraction, and empirical results that identify how the level of abstraction influences creative idea generation. Our results show that crowds find the most useful inspirations when the problem domain is represented abstractly and constraints are represented more concretely.

Online communities, much like companies in the business world, often need to transfer 'best practices' internally from one unit to another to improve their performance. Organizational scholars disagree about how much a recipient unit should modify a best practice when incorporating it. Some evidence indicates that modifying a practice that has been successful in one environment will introduce problems, undercut its effectiveness and harm the performance of the recipient unit. Other evidence, though, suggests that recipients need to adapt the practice to fit their local environment. The current research introduces a contingency perspective on practice transfer, holding that the value of modifications depends on when they are introduced and who introduces them. Empirical research on the transfer of a quality-improvement practice between projects within Wikipedia shows that modifications are more helpful if they are introduced after the receiving project has had experience with the imported practice. Furthermore, modifications are more effective if they are introduced by members who have experience in a variety of other projects.

Although xMOOCs are not designed to directly engage students via social media platforms, some students in these courses join MOOC-associated Facebook groups. This study explores the prevalence of Facebook groups associated with courses from MITx and HarvardX, the geographic distribution of students in such groups as compared to the courses at large, and the extent to which such groups are location and/or language homophilous. Results suggests that a non-trivial number of MOOC students engage in Facebook groups, that learners from a number of non-U.S. locations are disproportionately likely to participate in such groups, and that the groups display both location and language homophily. These findings have implications for how MOOCs and social media platforms can support learners from non-English speaking contexts.

Thousands of students enroll in Massive Open Online Courses~(MOOCs) to seek opportunities for learning and self-improvement. However, the learning process often involves struggles with confusion, which may have an adverse effect on the course participation experience, leading to dropout along the way. In this paper, we quantify that effect. We describe a classification model using discussion forum behavior and clickstream data to automatically identify posts that express confusion. We then apply survival analysis to quantify the impact of confusion on student dropout. The results demonstrate that the more confusion students express or are exposed to, the lower the probability of their retention. Receiving support and resolution of confusion helps mitigate this effect. We explore the differential effects of confusion expressed in different contexts and related to different aspects of courses. We conclude with implications for design of interventions towards improving the retention of students in MOOCs.

Distributed online groups have great potential for generating interdependent and complex products like encyclopedia articles or product design. However, coordinating multiple group members to work together effectively while minimizing process losses remains an open challenge. We conducted an experiment comparing the effectiveness of two coordination strategies (simultaneous vs. sequential work) on a complex creative task as the number of group members increased. Our results indicate that, contrary to prior work, a sequential work structure was more effective than a simultaneous work structure as the size of the group increased. A mediation analysis suggests that social processes such as territoriality partially accounts for these results. A follow up experiment giving workers specific roles mitigated the detrimental effects of the simultaneous work structure. These results have implications for small group theory and crowdsourcing research.

Scientists debate whether people grow closer to their friends through social networking sites like Facebook, whether those sites displace more meaningful interaction, or whether they simply reflect existing ties. Combining server log analysis and longitudinal surveys of 3,649 Facebook users reporting on relationships with 26,134 friends, we find that communication on the site is associated with changes in reported relationship closeness, over and above effects attributable to their face-to-face, phone, and email contact. Tie strength increases with both one-on-one communication, such as posts, comments, and messages, and through reading friends' broadcasted content, such as status updates and photos. The effect is greater for composed pieces, such as comments, posts, and messages than for 'one-click' actions such as 'likes.' Facebook has a greater impact on non-family relationships and ties who do not frequently communicate via other channels.

Research suggests that online health support benefits chronically ill users. Their satisfaction might be an indicator that they perceive group interactions as beneficial and a precursor to group commitment. We examined whether receiving emotional and informational support is satisfying in its own right, or whether satisfaction depends on matches between what users sought and what they received. Two studies collected judgments in a breast cancer support community of support users sought, support they received, and their expressed satisfaction. While receiving emotional or informational support in general positively predicted satisfaction, users expressed less satisfaction when they sought informational support but received emotional support. There was also a tendency for users to express more satisfaction when they sought and received informational support. On the other hand, users were equally satisfied with emotional and informational support after seeking emotional support. Implications for membership commitment and interventions in online support groups are discussed.

Seeking solutions from one domain to solve problems in another is an effective process of innovation. This process of analogy searching is difficult for both humans and machines. In this paper, we present a novel approach for re-presenting a problem in terms of its abstract structure, and then allowing people to use this structural representation to find analogies. We propose a crowdsourcing process that helps people navigate a large dataset to find analogies. Through two experiments, we show the benefits of using abstract structural representations to search for ideas that are analogous to a source problem, and that these analogies result in better solutions than alternative approaches. This work provides a useful method for finding analogies, and can streamline innovation for both novices and professional designers.

Harnessing crowds can be a powerful mechanism for increasing innovation. However, current approaches to crowd innovation rely on large numbers of contributors generating ideas independently in an unstructured way. We introduce a new approach called distributed analogical idea generation, which aims to make idea generation more effective and less reliant on chance. Drawing from the literature in cognitive science on analogy and schema induction, our approach decomposes the creative process in a structured way amenable to using crowds. In three experiments we show that distributed analogical idea generation leads to better ideas than example-based approaches, and investigate the conditions under which crowds generate good schemas and ideas. Our results have implications for improving creativity and building systems for distributed crowd innovation.

Online communities serve various important functions, but many fail to thrive. Research on community success has traditionally focused on internal factors. In contrast, we take an ecological view to understand how the success of a community is influenced by other communities. We measured a community's relationship with other communities - its "niche" - through four dimensions: topic overlap, shared members, content linking, and shared offline organizational affiliation. We used a mixed-method approach, combining the quantitative analysis of 9495 online enterprise communities and interviews with community members. Our results show that too little or too much overlap in topic with other communities causes a community's activity to suffer. We also show that this main result is moderated in predictable ways by whether the community shares members with, links to content in, or shares an organizational affiliation with other communities. These findings provide new insight on community success, guiding online community designers on how to effectively position their community in relation to others.

If the people belong to multiple online communities, their joint membership can influence the survival of each of the communities to which they belong. Communities with many joint memberships may struggle to get enough of their members' time and attention, but find it easy to import best practices from other communities. In this paper, we study the effects of membership overlap on the survival of online communities. By analyzing the historical data of 5673 Wikia communities, we find that higher levels of membership overlap are positively associated with higher survival rates of online communities. Furthermore, we find that it is beneficial for young communities to have shared members who play a central role in other mature communities. Our contributions are two-fold. Theoretically, by examining the impact of membership overlap on the survival of online communities we identified an important mechanism underlying the success of online communities. Practically, our findings may guide community creators on how to effectively manage their members, and tool designers on how to support this task.

As a class, online groups are popular, but many die before they become successful. This research traced the fate of 472,231 new online groups. By the end of a 3-month observation period, 57% of the groups had died, ceasing to post new content. Founders' human and social capital before the group was formed, the decisions they made when they created the group and their behavior in the group during its first week all predicted group survival. Many of the results suggest that founders create more successful groups if they have more resources (e.g., more online friends) and opportunities for acquiring relevant skills (e.g., more experience with online groups) and are more active in their group. However, founders who are too controlling seem to present a threat their groups. Their groups are more likely to fail if they are the only group administrator, if they have ties to all group members and if they were responsible for adding all group members.

Deviant behavior in online social systems is a difficult problem to address. Consequences of deviance include driving off users and tarnishing the system's public image. We present an examination of these concepts in a popular online game, League of Legends. Using a large collection of game records and player-given feedback, we develop a metric, toxicity index, to identify deviant players. We then look at the effects of interacting with deviant players, including effects on retention. We find that toxic players have several significant predictive patterns, such as playing in more competitive game modes and playing with friends. We also show that toxic players drive away new players, but that experienced players are more resilient to deviant behavior. Based on our findings, we suggest methods to better identify and counteract the negative effects of deviance.

Researchers and theorists have proposed that feelings of attachment to subgroups within a larger online community or site can increase users' loyalty to the site. They have identified two types of attachment, with distinct causes and consequences. With bond-based attachment, people feel connections to other group members, while with identity-based attachment they feel connections to the group as a whole. In two experiments we show that these feelings of attachment to subgroups increase loyalty to the larger community. Communication with other people in a subgroup but not simple awareness of them increases attachment to the larger community. By varying how the communication is structured, between dyads or with all group members simultaneously, the experiments show that bond- and identity-based attachment have different causes. But the experiments show no evidence that bond and identity attachment have different consequences. We consider both theoretical and methodological reasons why the consequences of bond-based and identity-based attachment are so similar.

The Internet has the potential to accelerate scientific problem solving by engaging a global pool of contributors. Existing approaches focus on broadcasting problems to many independent solvers. We investigate other approaches that may be advantageous by examining a community for mathematical problem solving -- MathOverflow -- in which contributors communicate and collaborate to solve new mathematical 'micro-problems' online. We contribute a simple taxonomy of collaborative acts derived from a process-level examination of collaborations and a quantitative analysis relating collaborative acts to solution quality. Our results indicate a diversity of ways in which mathematicians are reaching a solution, including by iteratively advancing a solution. A better understanding of such collaborative strategies can inform the design of tools to support distributed collaboration on complex problems.

A significant challenge for crowdsourcing has been increasing worker engagement and output quality. We explore the effects of social, learning, and financial strategies, and their combinations, on increasing worker retention across tasks and change in the quality of worker output. Through three experiments, we show that 1) using these strategies together increased workers' engagement and the quality of their work; 2) a social strategy was most effective for increasing engagement; 3) a learning strategy was most effective in improving quality. The findings of this paper provide strategies for harnessing the crowd to perform complex tasks, as well as insight into crowd workers' motivation.

In modern crowdsourcing markets, requesters face the challenge of training and managing large transient workforces. Requesters can hire peer workers to review others' work, but the value may be marginal, especially if the reviewers lack requisite knowledge. Our research explores if and how workers learn and improve their performance in a task domain by serving as peer reviewers. Further, we investigate whether peer reviewing may be more effective in teams where the reviewers can reach consensus through discussion. An online between-subjects experiment compares the trade-offs of reviewing versus producing work using three different organization strategies: working individually, working as an interactive team, and aggregating individuals into nominal groups. The results show that workers who review others' work perform better on subsequent tasks than workers who just produce. We also find that interactive reviewer teams outperform individual reviewers on all quality measures. However, aggregating individual reviewers into nominal groups produces better quality assessments than interactive teams, except in task domains where discussion helps overcome individual misconceptions.

Biographical details and talk summaries for the keynote talks presented at the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing.

The design of complex social systems, such as online communities, requires the consideration of many parameters, a practice at odds with social science research that focuses on the effects of a small set of variables. In this article, we show how synthesizing insights from multiple, narrowly focused social science theories in an agent-based model helps us understand factors that lead to the success of online communities. The agent-based model combines insights from theories related to collective effort, information overload, social identity, and interpersonal attraction to predict motivations for online community participation. We conducted virtual experiments to develop hypotheses around three design decisions about how to orchestrate an online community—topical breadth, message volume, and discussion moderation—and the trade-offs involved in making these decisions. The simulation experiments suggest that broad topics and high message volume can lead to higher member commitment. Personalized moderation outperforms other types of moderation in increasing members' commitment and contribution, especially in topically broad communities and those with high message volume. In comparison, community-level moderation increases commitment but not contribution, and only in topically narrow communities. These simulation results suggest a critical trade-off between informational and relational benefits. This research illustrates that there are many interactions among the design decisions that are important to consider; the particulars of the community's goals often determine the effectiveness of some decisions. It also demonstrates the value of agent-based modeling in synthesizing simple social science theories to describe and prescribe behaviors in a complex system, generating novel insights that inform the design of online communities.

Over the last decade, a citizen science movement has tried to engage students, laymen and other non-scientists in the production of science. However, there has been less attention in citizen science projects to use the public to disseminate scientific knowledge. Wikipedia provides a platform to study engagement of citizen scientists in knowledge dissemination. College and university students are especially appropriate members of the public to write science articles, because of the course-work and mentorship they receive from faculty. This paper describes a project to support students' writing of scientific articles in Wikipedia. In collaboration with a scientific association, we involved 640 students from 36 courses in editing scientific articles on Wikipedia. This paper provides details in the design of the program and our quantitative and qualitative approaches to evaluating it. Our results show that the Wikipedia classroom experiment benefits both the Wikipedia community and students. Undergraduate and graduate students substantially improved the scientific content of over 800 articles, at a level of quality indistinguishable from content written by PhD experts. Both students and faculty endorsed the motivational benefits of an authentic writing experience that would be read by thousands of people.

Although both men and women communicate frequently on Facebook, we know little about what they talk about, whether their topics differ and how their network responds. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), we identify topics from more than half a million Facebook status updates and determine which topics are more likely to receive feedback, such as likes and comments. Women tend to share more personal topics (e.g., family matters), while men discuss more public ones (e.g., politics and sports). Generally, women receive more feedback than men, but "male" topics (those more often posted by men) receive more feedback, especially when posted by women.

One of the most significant challenges for many online communities is increasing members' contributions over time. Prior studies on peer feedback in online communities have suggested its impact on contribution, but have been limited by their correlational nature. In this paper, we conducted a field experiment on Wikipedia to test the effects of different feedback types (positive feedback, negative feedback, directive feedback, and social feedback) on members' contribution. Our results characterize the effects of different feedback types, and suggest trade-offs in the effects of feedback between the focal task and general motivation, as well as differences in how newcomers and experienced editors respond to peer feedback. This research provides insights into the mechanisms underlying peer feedback in online communities and practical guidance to design more effective peer feedback systems.

Among those who have recently lost a job, social networks in general and online ones in particular may be useful to cope with stress and find new employment. This study focuses on the psychological and practical consequences of Facebook use following job loss. By pairing longitudinal surveys of Facebook users with logs of their online behavior, we examine how communication with different kinds of ties predicts improvements in stress, social support, bridging social capital, and whether they find new jobs. Losing a job is associated with increases in stress, while talking with strong ties is generally associated with improvements in stress and social support. Weak ties do not provide these benefits. Bridging social capital comes from both strong and weak ties. Surprisingly, individuals who have lost a job feel greater stress after talking with strong ties. Contrary to the "strength of weak ties" hypothesis, communication with strong ties is more predictive of finding employment within three months.

When pairs work together on a physical task, seeing a common workspace facilitates communication and benefits performance. When mediating such activities, however, the choice of technology can transform the visual information in ways that impact critical coordination processes. In this article we examine two coordination processes that are impacted by visual information—situation awareness and conversational grounding—which are theoretically distinct but often confounded in empirical research. We present three empirical studies that demonstrate how shared visual information supports collaboration through these two distinct routes. We also address how particular features of visual information interact with features of the task to influence situation awareness and conversational grounding, and further demonstrate how these features affect conversation and coordination. Experiment 1 manipulates the immediacy of the visual information and shows that immediate visual feedback facilitates collaboration by impro...

Theories about commitment in online settings and empirical evidence from offline environments suggest that greater communication in online groups should lead members to become more committed and participate longer. However, experimental evidence is sparse, in part because of difficulties inducing communication online. Moreover, previous work has not identified the route by which communication leads to increased commitment. In this paper, we investigated whether task versus social communication modeled by a leader versus a peer influenced the amount that group members talked and their willingness to continue participating in the group. We conducted an experiment within ad hoc groups in the online game World of Warcraft. Results suggest that communication early in a group's history causes members to talk more later on and that the early communication increases their commitment through its influence on group atmosphere rather than through increased member participation. Social communication by a peer is especially valuable in increasing commitment.

Although economists have long recognized the importance of a critical mass in growing a community, we know little about how it is achieved. This paper examines how initial topical focus influences communities' ability to attract a critical mass. When starting an online community, organizers need to define its initial scope. Topically narrow communities will probably attract a homogeneous group of interested in its content and compatible with each other. However, they are likely to attract fewer members than a diverse one because they offer only a subset of the topics. This paper reports an empirical analysis of longitudinal data collected from Twitter, where each new Twitter poster is considered the seed of a potential social collection. Users who focus the topics of their early tweets more narrowly ultimately attract more followers with more ties among them. Our results shed light on the development of online social networking structures.

Turnover is commonplace in many online groups because of low barriers of entry and exit. In offline settings, turnover can have a negative impact because of reduced attachment to the group as an entity. However, in an online setting, turnover in terms of changes in the visible membership of a group may have a very different impact. Online only a limited amount of information about members and their activities is observable; in particular, it is easier to see the behavior of the subset of members who are active than the potentially larger set who are not. In this paper, we describe an experiment examining the influence of visible membership turnover on commitment to an online group. Our results suggest that increased turnover in an online group may increase social presence, creating perceptions of liveness, in turn leading to increased levels of participation in the group. However, this result holds primarily for groups with a common identity, suggesting that attention to behavior of others may be stronger when people share an identity with those others. Our results extend understandings of attachment in an online setting as well as theory about social tuning.

Although many off-line organizations give their employees training, mentorship, a cohort and other socialization experiences that improve their retention and productivity, online production communities rarely do this. This paper describes the planning, execution and evaluation of a socialization regime for an online technical support community. In a two-phase project, we first automatically identified from participants' early behavior, those with high potential to become core members. We then designed, delivered and experimentally evaluated socialization experiences intended to build commitment and competence among these potential core members. We were able to identify potential core members with high accuracy from only two weeks of behavior. A year later, those classified as potential core members participated in the community ten times more actively than those not identified. In an evaluation experiment, some potential core members were randomly assigned to receive socialization experiences, while others were not. A year later, those who had participated in the socialization regime contributed more answers in the community compared to those in the control condition. The socialization experiences, however, undercut their sense of connection to the community and the quality of their contributions. We discuss what was effective and what could be improved in designing socialization experiences for online groups.

We report on a study of the English edition of Wikipedia in which we used a mixed methods approach to understand how nested organizational structures called WikiProjects support collaboration. We first conducted two rounds of interviews with a total of 20 Wikipedians to understand how WikiProjects function and what it's like to participate in them from the perspective of Wikipedia editors. We then used a quantitative approach to further explore interpretations that arose from the qualitative data. Our analysis of these data together demonstrates how WikiProjects not only help Wikipedians coordinate tasks and produce articles, but also support community members and small groups of editors in important ways such as: providing a place to find collaborators, socialize and network; protecting editors' work; and structuring opportunities to contribute.

Though toolkits exist to create complex crowdsourced workflows, there is limited support for management of those workflows. Managing crowd workers and tasks requires significant iteration and experimentation on task instructions, rewards, and flows. We present CrowdWeaver, a system to visually manage complex crowd work. The system supports the creation and reuse of crowdsourcing and computational tasks into integrated task flows, manages the flow of data between tasks, and allows tracking and notification of task progress, with support for real-time modification. We describe the system and demonstrate its utility through case studies and user feedback.

Today many people with serious diseases use online support groups to seek social support. For these groups to be sustained and effective, member retention and commitment is important. Our study examined how different types and amounts of social support in an online cancer support group are associated with participants' length of membership. We first built machine learning models to automatically identify the extent to which messages contained emotional and informational support. Agreement with human judges was high (r > 0.76). We then used these models to measure the support exchanged in 1.5 million messages. Finally, we applied quantitative event history analysis to assess how exposure to emotional and informational support predicted group members' length of subsequent participation. The results demonstrated that the more emotional support members were exposed to, the lower the risk of dropout. In contrast, informational support did not have the same strong effects on commitment. We speculate that emotional support enhanced members' relationships with one another or the group as a whole, whereas informational support satisfied members' short-term information needs.

Traditional research on leadership in online communities has consistently focused on the small set of people occupying leadership roles. In this paper, we use a model of shared leadership, which posits that leadership behaviors come from members at all levels, not simply from people in high-level leadership positions. Although every member can exhibit some leadership behavior, different types of leadership behavior performed by different types of leaders may not be equally effective. This paper investigates how distinct types of leadership behaviors (transactional, aversive, directive and person-focused) and the legitimacy of the people who deliver them (people in formal leadership positions or not) influence the contributions that other participants make in the context of Wikipedia. After using propensity score matching to control for potential pre-existing differences among those who were and were not targets of leadership behaviors, we found that 1) leadership behaviors performed by members at all levels significantly influenced other members' motivation; 2) transactional leadership and person-focused leadership were effective in motivating others to contribute more, whereas aversive leadership decreased other contributors' motivations; and 3) legitimate leaders were in general more influential than regular peer leaders. We discuss the theoretical and practical implication of our work.

A challenge for many online production communities is to direct their members to accomplish tasks that are important to the group, even when these tasks may not match individual members' interests. Here we investigate how combining group identification and direction setting can motivate volunteers in online communities to accomplish tasks important to the success of the group as a whole. We hypothesize that group identity, the perception of belonging to a group, triggers in-group favoritism; and direction setting (including explicit direction from group goals and implicit direction from role models) focuses people's group-oriented motivation towards the group's important tasks. We tested our hypotheses in the context of Wikipedia's Collaborations of the Week (COTW), a group goal setting mechanism and a social event within Wikiprojects. Results demonstrate that 1) publicizing important group goals via COTW can have a strong motivating influence on editors who have voluntarily identified themselves as group members compared to those who have not self-identified; 2) the effects of goals spill over to non-goal related tasks; and 3) editors exposed to group role models in COTW are more likely to perform similarly to the models on group-relevant citizenship behaviors. Finally, we discuss design and managerial implications based on our findings.

Though social network site use is often treated as a monolithic activity, in which all time is equally social and its impact the same for all users, we examine how Facebook affects social capital depending upon: (1) types of site activities, contrasting one-on-one communication, broadcasts to wider audiences, and passive consumption of social news, and (2) individual differences among users, including social communication skill and self-esteem. Longitudinal surveys matched to server logs from 415 Facebook users reveal that receiving messages from friends is associated with increases in bridging social capital, but that other uses are not. However, using the site to passively consume news assists those with lower social fluency draw value from their connections. The results inform site designers seeking to increase social connectedness and the value of those connections.

This study explores whether certain contribution incentives for online user-generated content can undermine or enhance contributor's credibility. In an online experiment, we found that contributors who are rewarded with donations made in their names are perceived to be more credible than contributors who are financially compensated through revenue-sharing or contribute voluntarily. In addition, disclosing the chosen charity for donation can also impact credibility. Content viewer's self-identification with charity and the congruency between charity and content topic are both factors that may enhance credibility. Our findings lead to practical implications on when and how to use contribution incentives to enhance credibility.

The quantity of email people receive each day can be overwhelming. Previous research suggests that when handling email, individuals prioritize certain messages for attention over others. Since people generally make this decision about which message to read before opening the email, the question largely unanswered in the email literature is: what surface features of an email draw attention to it? In this research, we examined how top-level cues about an email's content influence attention to email. We describe results from a think-aloud study examining people's stated rationale for prioritizing certain emails over others. Based on these results and theory on curiosity, we conducted an experiment examining how message importance, subject line specificity, workload and personal utility influence attention to email. Results suggest that uncertainty about message content at the inbox level increases the likelihood of attention to a message. The influence of uncertainty diminishes, however, in the face of enhanced task and personal utility cues and increased demand, suggesting that curiosity operates in an intrinsic way in the email context. Our results have implications for intelligent email system design, email client interfaces, and reducing email strain.

In this paper, we introduce a method to measure shared leadership in Wikipedia as a step in developing a new model of online leadership. We show that editors with varying degrees of engagement and from peripheral as well as central roles all act like leaders, but that core and peripheral editors show different profiles of leadership behavior. Specifically, we developed machine learning models to automatically identify four types of leadership behaviors from 4 million messages sent between Wikipedia editors. We found strong evidence of shared leadership in Wikipedia, with editors in peripheral roles producing a large proportion of leadership behaviors.

The existence and survival of online communities depends upon the commitment and retention of their members. This paper compares alternative ways of designing online sites to increase member commitment. We report the results of two experiments conducted within a Facebook game application. The results show that designs can increase commitment and retention of players either by visually highlighting individual members, or by emphasizing the community as a whole. These designs influence commitment through different routes.

Micro-task markets such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk represent a new paradigm for accomplishing work, in which employers can tap into a large population of workers around the globe to accomplish tasks in a fraction of the time and money of more traditional methods. However, such markets have been primarily used for simple, independent tasks, such as labeling an image or judging the relevance of a search result. Here we present a general purpose framework for accomplishing complex and interdependent tasks using micro-task markets. We describe our framework, a web-based prototype, and case studies on article writing, decision making, and science journalism that demonstrate the benefits and limitations of the approach.

Electronic commerce has enabled a number of online pay-for-answer services. However, despite commercial interest, we still lack a comprehensive understanding of how financial incentives support question asking and answering. Using 800 questions randomly selected from a pay-for-answer site, along with site usage statistics, we examined what factors impact askers' decisions to pay. We also explored how financial rewards affect answers, and if question pricing can help organize Q&A exchanges for archival purposes. We found that askers' decisions are two-part--whether or not to pay and how much to pay. Askers are more likely to pay when requesting facts and will pay more when questions are more difficult. On the answer side, our results support prior findings that paying more may elicit a higher number of answers and answers that are longer, but may not elicit higher quality answers (as rated by the askers). Finally, we present evidence that questions with higher rewards have higher archival value, which suggests that pricing can be used to support archival use.

The defining characteristics of autism, including difficulty with nonverbal cues and need for structure, and the defining characteristics of computer-mediated communication (CMC), including reduction of extraneous cues and structured exchange, suggest the two would be an ideal match. Interviews and observations of 16 adults on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum reveal that many seek greater social connectedness and take advantage of interest-based online communities to foster successful, supportive relationships. However, CMC intensifies problems of trust, disclosure, inflexible thinking, and perspective-taking, making it difficult for some to maintain relationships. Interventions in the form of information visualization and CMC-specific social skills training are presented. Intervention considerations and participatory design opportunities are discussed.

Socialization of newcomers is critical both for conventional groups. It helps groups perform effectively and the newcomers develop commitment. However, little empirical research has investigated the impact of specific socialization tactics on newcomers' commitment to online groups. We examined WikiProjects, subgroups in Wikipedia organized around working on common topics or tasks. In study 1, we identified the seven socialization tactics used most frequently: invitations to join, welcome messages, requests to work on project-related tasks, offers of assistance, positive feedback on a new member's work, constructive criticism, and personal-related comments. In study 2, we examined their impact on newcomers' commitment to the project. Whereas most newcomers contributed fewer edits over time, the declines were slowed or reversed for those socialized with welcome messages, assistance, and constructive criticism. In contrast, invitations led to steeper declines in edits. These results suggest that different socialization tactics play different roles in socializing new members in online groups compared to offline ones.

Online production groups have the potential to transform the way that knowledge is produced and disseminated. One of the most widely used forms of online production is the wiki, which has been used in domains ranging from science to education to enterprise. We examined the development of and interactions between coordination and conflict in a sample of 6811 wiki production groups. We investigated the influence of four coordination mechanisms: intra-article communication, inter-user communication, concentration of workgroup structure, and policy and procedures. We also examined the growth of conflict, finding the density of users in an information space to be a significant predictor. Finally, we analyzed the effectiveness of the four coordination mechanisms on managing conflict, finding differences in how each scaled to large numbers of contributors. Our results suggest that coordination mechanisms effective for managing conflict are not always the same as those effective for managing task quality, and that designers must take into account the social benefits of coordination mechanisms in addition to their production benefits.

The success of Wikipedia has demonstrated the power of peer production in knowledge building. However, unlike many other examples of collective intelligence, tasks in Wikipedia can be deeply interdependent and may incur high coordination costs among editors. Increasing the number of editors increases the resources available to the system, but it also raises the costs of coordination. This suggests that the dependencies of tasks in Wikipedia may determine whether they benefit from increasing the number of editors involved. Specifically, we hypothesize that adding editors may benefit low-coordination tasks but have negative consequences for tasks requiring a high degree of coordination. Furthermore, concentrating the work to reduce coordination dependencies should enable more efficient work by many editors. Analyses of both article ratings and article review comments provide support for both hypotheses. These results suggest ways to better harness the efforts of many editors in social collaborative systems involving high coordination tasks.

In this work, we introduce the use of tags to support the near synchronous use of instant messaging. As a proof-of-concept, we developed a plug-in in Lotus Sametime, an enterprise IM client. Our plug-in supports tasks that do not need immediate attention and tasks that have deadlines. A trial deployment and survey shows that users can see the potential usefulness of such a tagging system in their IM communication. Furthermore, users rated our design intuitive and easy to use. Longer study is needed to explore communication norms that results from its use.

Many observers have praised new communication technologies for providing convenient and affordable tools for maintaining relationships at a distance. Yet the precise role of mediated communication in relationship maintenance has been difficult to isolate. In this paper, we treat residential moves as natural experiments that threaten existing social relationships and often force people to rely on mediated communication to maintain their old relationships. Results from a 3-wave survey of 900 residential movers describing 1892 relationships shows that email and the telephone play different roles in social relationships. Email helps maintain social relationships, in the sense that relationships decline when email drops after the move. However increases in email are not associated with increases in the depth of the relationship or exchanges of support. In contrast, phone calls help movers grow relationships and exchange social support.

This paper presents a model of the behavior of candidates for promotion to administrator status in Wikipedia. It uses a policy capture framework to highlight similarities and differences in the community's stated criteria for promotion decisions to those criteria actually correlated with promotion success. As promotions are determined by the consensus of dozens of voters with conflicting opinions and unwritten expectations, the results highlight the degree to which consensus is truly reached. The model is fast and easily computable on the fly, and thus could be applied as a self-evaluation tool for editors considering becoming administrators, as a dashboard for voters to view a nominee's relevant statistics, or as a tool to automatically search for likely future administrators. Implications for distributed consensus-building in online communities are discussed.

Little is known about the impact of politeness in online communities. We use an inductive approach to automatically model linguistic politeness in online discussion groups and determine the impact of politeness on desired outcomes, such as increased reply rates. We describe differences in perceived politeness across a variety of groups and find that, controlling for group norms of responsiveness and message length, politeness increases reply rates in some technical groups, but rudeness is more effective in some political groups. The perceived politeness scores will be used to validate linguistic politeness strategies from theory and to inform the creation of a machine learning model of linguistic politeness that can be applied as a "politeness checker" to educate newcomers to write in ways likely to elicit response from specific communities or as a rudeness detection tool for moderators.

There is a growing interest in applying market mechanisms to tackle everyday communication problems such as communication interruptions and communication overload. Prior analytic proofs have shown that a signaling and screening mechanism can make senders and recipients of messages better off. However, these proofs make certain assumptions that do not hold in real world environments. For example, these prior works assume that there are no transaction costs in a communication market and that monetary incentives are the only motivators in communication between strangers.

Wikipedia's success is often attributed to the large numbers of contributors who improve the accuracy, completeness and clarity of articles while reducing bias. However, because of the coordination needed to write an article collaboratively, adding contributors is costly. We examined how the number of editors in Wikipedia and the coordination methods they use affect article quality. We distinguish between explicit coordination, in which editors plan the article through communication, and implicit coordination, in which a subset of editors structure the work by doing the majority of it. Adding more editors to an article improved article quality only when they used appropriate coordination techniques and was harmful when they did not. Implicit coordination through concentrating the work was more helpful when many editors contributed, but explicit coordination through communication was not. Both types of coordination improved quality more when an article was in a formative stage. These results demonstrate the critical importance of coordination in effectively harnessing the "wisdom of the crowd" in online production environments.

A number of recent studies have demonstrated that groups benefit considerably from access to shared visual information. This is due, in part, to the communicative efficiencies provided by the shared visual context. However, a large gap exists between our current theoretical understanding and our existing models. We address this gap by developing a computational model that integrates linguistic cues with visual cues in a way that effectively models reference during tightly-coupled, task-oriented interactions. The results demonstrate that an integrated model significantly outperforms existing language-only and visual-only models. The findings can be used to inform and augment the development of conversational agents, applications that dynamically track discourse and collaborative interactions, and dialogue managers for natural language interfaces.

A longitudinal design was employed to collect three waves of survey data over a 14 month period from 2790 online gamers. Respondents were asked questions about their gaming activity, motivations, personality, social and emotional environment, and the effect gaming has had on their lives. Prospective analysis was used to establish causal and temporal linkages among the repeatedly measured factors. While the data provide some indication that a player's reasons for playing do influence the development of problematic usage, these effects are overshadowed by the central importance of self-regulation in managing both the timing and amount of play. An individual's level of self-regulatory activity is shown to be very important in allowing them to avoid negative outcomes like problematic use. The role of depression is also discussed. With responsible use, online gaming appears to be a healthy recreational activity that provides millions of people with hours of social entertainment and adaptive diversion. However, failure to manage play behavior can lead to feelings of dependency.

Watching video online is becoming increasingly popular, and new video streaming technologies have the potential to transform video watching from a passive, isolating experience into an active, socially engaging experience. However, the viability of an active social experience is unclear: both chatting and watching video require attention, and may interfere with one another and detract from the experience. In this paper, we empirically examine the activity of chatting while watching video online. We examine how groups of friends and strangers interact, and find that chat has a positive influence on social relationships, and people chat despite being distracted. We discuss the benefits and opportunities provided by mixing chat and video, uncover some of the attentional and social challenges inherent in this combination of media, and provide guidance for structuring the viewing experience.

Many small online communities would benefit from increased diversity or activity in their membership. Some communities run the risk of dying out due to lack of participation. Others struggle to achieve the critical mass necessary for diverse and engaging conversation. But what tools are available to these communities to increase participation? Our goal in this research was to spark contributions to the movielens.org discussion forum, where only 2% of the members write posts. We developed personalized invitations, messages designed to entice users to visit or contribute to the forum. In two field experiments, we ask (1) if personalized invitations increase activity in a discussion forum, (2) how the choice of algorithm for intelligently choosing content to emphasize in the invitation affects participation, and (3) how the suggestion made to the user affects their willingness to act. We find that invitations lead to increased participation, as measured by levels of reading and posting. More surprisingly, we find that invitations emphasizing the social nature of the discussion forum increase user activity, while invitations emphasizing other details of the discussion are less successful.

People come to online communities seeking information, encouragement, and conversation. When a community responds, participants benefit and become more committed. Yet interactions often fail. In a longitudinal sample of 6,172 messages from 8 Usenet newsgroups, 27% of posts received no response. The information context, posters' prior engagement in the community, and the content of their posts all influenced the likelihood that they received a reply, and, as a result, their willingness to continue active participation. Posters were less likely to get a reply if they were newcomers. Posting ontopic, introducing oneself via autobiographical testimonials, asking questions, using less complex language and other features of the messages, increased replies. Results suggest ways that developers might increase the ability of online communities to support successful individual-group interactions.

When pairs work together on a physical task, seeing a common workspace benefits their performance and transforms their use of language. Previous results have demonstrated that visual information helps collaborative pairs to understand the current state of their task, ground their conversations, and communicate efficiently. However, collaborative technologies often impinge on the visual information needed to support successful collaboration. One example of this is the introduction of delayed visual feedback in a collaborative environment. We present results from two studies that detail the form of the function that describes the relationship between visual delay and collaborative task performance. The first study precisely demonstrates how a range of visual delays differentially impact performance and the collaborative strategies employed. The second study describes how parameters of the task, such as the dynamics of the visual environment, reduce the amount of delay that can be tolerated.

One of the important challenges faced by designers of online communities is eliciting sufficent contributions from community members. Users in online communities may have difficulty either in finding opportunities to add value, or in understanding the value of their contributions to the community. Various social science theories suggest that showing users different perspectives on the value they add to the community will lead to differing amounts of contribution. The present study investigates a design augmentation for an existing community Web site that could benefit from additional contribution. The augmented interface includes individualized opportunities for contribution and an estimate of the value of each contribution to the community. The value is computed in one of four different ways: (1) value to self; (2) value to a small group the user has affinity with; (3) value to a small group the user does not have affinity with; and (4) value to the entire user community. The study compares the effectiveness of the different notions of value to 160 community members.

In this paper we examine how routine uses of the Internet for communication with family and friends and for entertainment may serve as indicators of overall levels of psychological well-being. Changes in psychological well-being in response to a major life event, such as a residential move, can drive changes in routine uses of the Internet, suggesting Internet-based coping strategies. Specifically, women who report high levels of depressive affect, decrease internet use for communication. Men with similar levels of depressive affect increase internet use for entertainment. We discuss implications of these findings for our understanding of the role of the Internet in everyday behavior and instances of coping with stressful situations.

Almost every office worker can relate to feelings of email overload and stress, but in reality the concept of email strain is not well understood. In this paper, we describe a large-scale nationwide organizational survey examining the relationship between email use and feelings of email overload and task coordination. We found that higher email volume was associated with increased feelings of email overload, but this relationship was moderated by certain email management strategies. The contribution to the field of CSCW is a better understanding of the concept of email related stress, and initial scale development for the assessment of email-related overload and perceptions of the work-importance of email.

The Web plays a critical role in hosting Web communities, their content and interactions. A prime example is the open source software (OSS) community, whose members, including software developers and users, interact almost exclusively over the Web, constantly generating, sharing and refining content in the form of software code through active interaction over the Web on code design and bug resolution processes. The Semantic Web is an envisaged extension of the current Web, in which content is given a well defined meaning, through the specification of metadata and ontologies, increasing the utility of the content and enabling information from heterogeneous sources to be integrated. We developed a prototype Semantic Web system for OSS communities, Dhruv. Dhruv provides an enhanced semantic interface to bug resolution messages and recommends related software objects and artifacts. Dhruv uses an integrated model of the OpenACS community, the software, and the Web interactions, which is semi-automatically populated from the existing artifacts of the community.

Email consumes significant time and attention in the workplace. We conducted an organizational survey to understand how and why people attend to incoming email messages. We examined people's ratings of message importance and the actions they took on specific email messages, based on message characteristics and characteristics of receivers and senders. Respondents kept half of their new messages in the inbox and replied to about a third of them. They rated messages as important if they were about work and required action. Importance, in turn, had a modest impact on whether people replied to their incoming messages and whether they saved them. The results indicate that factors other than message importance (e.g., their social nature) also determine how people handle email. Overall, email usage reflects attentional differences due both to personal propensities and to work demands and relationships.

How much history of the dialogue should a chat client include? Some chat clients have minimized the dialogue history to deploy the space for other purposes. A theory of conversational coordination suggests that stripping away history raises the cost of conversational grounding, creating problems for both writers and readers. To test this proposition and inform design, we conducted an experiment in which one person instructed another on how to solve a simple puzzle. Participants had chat clients that showed either a single conversational turn or six of them. Having the dialogue history helped collaborators communicate efficiently and led to faster and better task performance. The dialogue history was most useful when the puzzles were more linguistically complex and when instructors could not see the work area. We present evidence of participants adapting their discourse to partially compensate for deficits in the communication media.

CSCW as a field has been driven primarily by researchers' desire to solve real world problems of groups and organizations, and to use new technology to solve these problems. The field has accumulated a set of empirically-based interdisciplinary studies and many interesting new applications. The question to be addressed in this panel is whether CSCW as a field is ready for theory--whether theory is needed to move the field along, or on the contrary, whether the problems and the technology are still too new or are changing too fast to accommodate theory. The panelists will describe some of the organization theories that could be applied to CSCW, and debate their usefulness, taking both sides of the question.

Under-contribution is a problem for many online communities. Social psychology theories of social loafing and goal-setting can provide mid-level design principles to address this problem. We tested the design principles in two field experiments. In one, members of an online movie recommender community were reminded of the uniqueness of their contributions and the benefits that follow from them. In the second, they were given a range of individual or group goals for contribution. As predicted by theory, individuals contributed when they were reminded of their uniqueness and when they were given specific and challenging goals, but other predictions were not borne out. The paper ends with suggestions and challenges for mining social science theories as well as implications for design.

Spontaneous communication is common in the workplace but can be disruptive. Such communication usually benefits the initiator more than the target of the disruption. Previous research has indicated that awareness displays showing the workload of a target can reduce the harm interruptions inflict, but can increase the cognitive load on interrupters. This paper describes an experiment testing whether team membership influences interrupters' motivation to use awareness displays and whether the informational-intensity of a display influences its utility and cost. Results indicate interrupters use awareness displays to time communication only when they and their partners are rewarded as a team and that this timing improves the target's performance on a continuous attention task. Eye-tracking data shows that monitoring an information-rich display imposes a substantial attentional cost on the interrupters, and that an abstract display provides similar benefit with less distraction.

A shared visual workspace allows multiple people to see similar views of objects and environments. Prior empirical literature demonstrates that visual information helps collaborators understand the current state of their task and enables them to communicate and ground their conversations efficiently. We present an empirical study that demonstrates how action replaces explicit verbal instruction in a shared visual workspace. Pairs performed a referential communication task with and without a shared visual space. A detailed sequential analysis of the communicative content reveals that pairs with a shared workspace were less likely to explicitly verify their actions with speech. Rather, they relied on visual information to provide the necessary communicative and coordinative cues.

This study assessed the value of two video configurations-a head-mounted camera with eye tracking capability and a scene camera providing a view of the work environment-on remote collaboration on physical (3D) tasks. Pairs of participants performed five robot construction tasks in five media conditions: side-by-side, audio-only, head-mounted camera, scene camera, and scene plus head cameras. Task completion times were shortest in the side-by-side condition, and shorter with the scene camera than in the audio-only condition. Participants rated their work quality highest when side-by-side, intermediate with the scene camera, and worst in the audio-only and head-camera conditions. Similarly, helpers' self-rated ability to assist workers and pairs' communication efficiency were highest in the side-by-side condition, but significantly higher with the scene camera than in the audio-only condition. The results demonstrate the value of a shared view of the work environment for remote collaboration on physical tasks.

In this article we consider the ways in which visual information is used as a conversational resource in the accomplishment of collaborative physical tasks. We focus on the role of visual information in maintaining task awareness and in achieving mutual understanding in conversation. We first describe the theoretical framework we use to analyze the role of visual information in physical collaboration. Then, we present two experiments that vary the amount and quality of the visual information available to participants during a collaborative bicycle repair task. We examine the effects of this visual information on performance and on conversational strategies. We conclude with a general discussion of how situational awareness and conversational grounding are achieved in collaborative tasks and with some design considerations for systems to support remote collaborative repair.

A shared visual workspace is one where multiple people can see the same objects at roughly the same time. We present findings from an experiment investigating the effects of shared visual space on a collaborative puzzle task. We show that having the shared visual space helps collaborators understand the current state of their task and enables them to communicate and ground their conversations efficiently. These processes are associated with faster and better task performance. Delaying the visual update in the space reduces benefits and degrades performance. The shared visual space is more useful when tasks are visually complex or when actors have no simple vocabulary for describing their world. We find evidence for the ways in which participants adapt their discourse processes to their level of shared visual information.

Balancing the needs of information distributors and their audiences has grown harder in the age of the Internet. While the demand for attention continues to increase rapidly with the volume of information and communication, the supply of human attention is relatively fixed. Markets are a social institution for efficiently balancing supply and demand of scarce resources. Charging a price for sending messages may help discipline senders from demanding more attention than they are willing to pay for. Price may also help recipients estimate the value of a message before reading it. We report the results of two laboratory experiments to explore the consequences of a pricing system for electronic mail. Charging postage for email causes senders to be more selective and send fewer messages. However, recipients did not use the postage paid by senders as a signal of importance. These studies suggest markets for attention have potential, but their design needs more work.

This paper presents an awareness tool designed to help distributed, asynchronous groups solve problems quickly. Using a lab study, it was found that groups that used the awareness tool tended to converge and agree upon a solution more quickly. However, it was also found that individuals who did not use the awareness tool got closer to the correct solution. Implications for the design of awareness tools are discussed, with particular attention paid to the importance of matching the features of an awareness tool with a workgroup's tasks and goals.

We outline some of the benefits of shared visual information for collaborative repair tasks and report on a study comparing collaborative performance on a manual task by workers and helpers who are located side-by-side or connected via audio-video or audio-only links. Results show that the dyads complete the task more quickly and accurately when helpers are co-located than when they are connected via an audio link. However, they didn't achieve similar efficiency gains when they communicated through an audio/video link. These results demonstrate the value of a shared visual work space, but raise questions about the adequacy of current video communication technology for implementing it.

Despite advances in technology, nearly everyone experiences technical challenges using home computers and the Internet. In a field trial of household Internet usage, 89% of 93 families needed support from a computer help desk in the 1st year they used the Internet. However, usually only the most technically involved members of the family requested external technical support, and this behavior was associated with other computer-related behaviors in the household. We explore the process by which a family member with comparatively high technical skill or enthusiasm, often a teenager, becomes the family guru, makes external support requests, and becomes the person in the family to whom others turn for technical help. The family guru benefits from this role, influences the household's adoption of technology, and represents an important link between households and computer support professionals. The role also is a fascinating example of the evolution of intergeneration relationships.

Article Communication and information: alternative uses of the Internet in households Share on Authors: Robert Kraut Human Computer Interaction Institute, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA Human Computer Interaction Institute, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PAView Profile , Tridas Mukhopadhyay Human Computer Interaction Institute, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA Human Computer Interaction Institute, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PAView Profile , Janusz Szczypula Human Computer Interaction Institute, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA Human Computer Interaction Institute, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PAView Profile , Sara Kiesler Human Computer Interaction Institute, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA Human Computer Interaction Institute, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PAView Profile , William Scherlis Human Computer Interaction Institute, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA Human Computer Interaction Institute, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PAView Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '98: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsJanuary 1998 Pages 368–375https://doi.org/10.1145/274644.274695Online:01 January 1998Publication History 32citation2,409DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations32Total Downloads2,409Last 12 Months35Last 6 weeks4 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

The god of this paper is to iden@ the communication tactics that tiow management teams to successtiy coordinate without becoming overloaded, and to see whether successti coordination and fidom from overload independently Muence team pefiormance.We found that how much teams comnumicatti, what they communicated abou~and the technologies they used to communicate prdlcted coordination and overload.Team coordination but not overload prdlcted team SUWSS.

No abstract available.

Article Free Access Share on HomeNet: a field trial of residential Internet services Authors: Robert Kraut Human Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA Human Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PAView Profile , William Scherlis Human Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA Human Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PAView Profile , Tridas Mukhopadhyay Human Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA Human Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PAView Profile , Jane Manning Human Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA Human Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PAView Profile , Sara Kiesler Human Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA Human Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PAView Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '96: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsApril 1996 Pages 284–291https://doi.org/10.1145/238386.238531Published:13 April 1996Publication History 30citation1,769DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations30Total Downloads1,769Last 12 Months132Last 6 weeks9 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteView all FormatsPDF

Goals and content: This tutorial will explain how video/audio networks are built and how they are typically used. An introduction to the concepts and terminology of video, audio, digital compression, transmission networks, and station equipment is provided. Participants can expect to learn what people like and dislike about these systems, and the avenues that are being explored to overcome their shortcomings. About the instructors: Robert Fish is the Executive Director of the Multimedia Intelligent Networking Research Department at Bellcore. Robert Kraut is professor of social psycology and human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University.

We report an empirical study of people using mobile collaborative systems to support maintenance tasks on a bicycle.Results show that field workers make repairs more quickly and accurately when they have a remote expert helping them.Some pairs were connected by a shared video system, where the video camera focused on the active workspace and they communicated with full duplex audio.For other pairs, either the video was eliminated or the audio was reduced to half duplex (but not both).Pairs' success at collaboration did not vary with the communication technology.However, the manner in which they coordinated advice-giving did vary with the communication technology.In particular, help was more proactive and coordination was less explicit when the pairs had video connections.The results show the value of collaboration, but raise questions about the interaction of communication media and conversational coordination on task performance.

An interdisciplimary research group at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is investigating the design and usefulness of mobile CSCW systems for the support of distributed diagnosis, repair, and redesign of large vehicles, such as aircraft and trains. These systems incorporate diagnostic aids, on-line maintenance manuals, schematic drawings, and telecommunications that allow workers to access both stored information and interactive help from remote experts. This videotape illustrates the problem area and some wearable computer prototypes. It describes some of the field work we have done documenting the value of collaboration when workers are diagnosing and repairing complex equipment. Our laboratory experiments investigate whether wireless video capabilities are useful. One prototype incorporates both shared computer-based information (an on-line repair manual) and a shared view of the non-computerized work space (a video feed from a head-mounted camera). Experiments so far show that commumication with a remote expert improves the speed and quality of repairs, but that shared video does not. Video does, however, affect how collaborators coordinate their behavior, for example by allowing a pair to be less verbally explicit. The videotape illustrates how a collaborative pair can exploit both shared data sources to communicate more effectively.

This field experiment investigates individual, structural and social influences on the use of two video telephone systems. One system flourished, while an equivalent system died. We use a time series design and multiple data sources to test media richness theory, critical mass theory, and social influence theories about new media use. Results show that the fit between tasks and features of the communications medium influences use to a degree, but cannot explain why only one system survived. Critical mass—the numbers of people one can reach on a system—and social influence—the norms that grow up around a new medium—can explain this phenomenon.

Collaborations in organizations thrive on communication that is informal because informal communication is frequent, interactive, and expressive. Informal communication is crucial for the coordination of work, learning an organization's culture, the perpetuation of the social relations that underlie collaboration, and, in general, any situation that requires communication to resolve ambiguity. Informal communication is traditionally mediated by physical proximity, but physical proximity cannot mediate in geographically distributed organizations. The research described here evaluates the adequacy of a version of a desktop video/audio conferencing system for supporting informal communication in a research and development laboratory. The evaluation took place during a trial in which the system was used by summer employees and their supervisor-mentors. While the system was used frequently, the most common uses and users' assessments suggest that it was used more like a telephone or electronic mail than like physically mediated face-to-face communication. However, some features of its use transcended traditional media and allowed users to gain awareness of their work environment. The paper concludes with a discussion of requirements for successful technology to support informal communication.

This paper reviews the design and implementation of several video telephony systems at Bellcore as a case study in iterative design.In contrast to single user compuer applications, communication systems consists of both the interconnection technology and the people who are interconnected.From a user's point of view, the capabilities provided by the system, the rules for its use, and its reaction to their actions depend jointly on what its developers implemented and how other users behave.This fact has wide-ranging implications for system design, use, and evaluation.In reviewing our design experience, we identify four dilemmas for iterative design that flow from the inherently social nature of communication systems.We conclude with methodological and theoretical suggestions to supplement conventional iterative design principles as applied to communications systems.

Article Free Access Share on Computer-mediated communication and collaborative writing: media influence and adaptation to communication constraints Authors: Jolene Galegher View Profile , Robert E. Kraut View Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '92: Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative workDecember 1992 Pages 155–162https://doi.org/10.1145/143457.143474Published:01 December 1992Publication History 15citation1,083DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations15Total Downloads1,083Last 12 Months45Last 6 weeks3 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

Modalities such as face-to-face meetings permit rich communication, which involves both expressiveness and interactivity. Modalities such as text annotation or electronic mail, however, limit both. Contingency theory, as applied to collaborative writing, says that as the equivocality of the writing task increases, communication modalities that support rich communication are more likely to be used. In addition, it says that if these modalities are used, equivocal tasks can be carried out with greater ease and better results. This article explores these hypotheses using multiple data sources: an interview study tracing the history of 55 published collaborative articles, two field experiments comparing the use of face-to-face communication and electronic mail as media for collaborative writing, and a laboratory experiment comparing voice and text as media for annotating documents. Taken together, the findings of these investigations are loosely consistent with a contingency theory of media use, but they suggest that careful measures of task characteristics are needed to obtain a detailed understanding of the effects of particular task/technology combinations. Further, they indicate that it may be important to consider the distinction between the interactivity and expressiveness components of media richness in making decisions about what technologies to buy or build.

Both theory and data suggest that that richer, more informal, and more interactive media should be better suited for handling the more complex, equivocal, and emotional aspects of collaborative tasks.To test this hypothesis, we constructed an experiment in which participants were required to make either written or spoken annotations to a document to help a fictional co-author revise it.We seeded relatively error-free texts with errors of different scope .The results provide strong evidence that a richer --in the sense of a more expressive -medium is especially valuable for the more complex, controversial, and social aspects of a collaborative task.Subjects stated that they preferred to use voice to comment on higher-level issues in a document and to use text to deal with lower-level problems of spelling and grammar.When subjects' annotation modalities were restricted, using written annotations led them to comment on more local problems in the text, while using speech Icd lhem to comment on higher level concerns.When lhey did use written annotations to comment on global problems, they were less successful than when they used spoken annotations.Finally, when they offered spoken annotations, they were more likely to add features, such as personal pronouns and explanation, that made their comments more equivocal and socially communicative.These results indicate the uses to which systems that provide voice annotation are likely to be put.

Bellcore has several active research programs relevant to human-computer interaction. This talk describes research conducted in the Cognitive Science and Interpersonal Communications Research Groups. We describe their research on information retrieval and on collaboration and pay particular attention to the styles of research employed in these groups and to the way in which behavioral investigations have guided technical invention.

Article Free Access Share on The VideoWindow system in informal communication Authors: Robert S. Fish Bellcore, 445 South Street, Morristown, NJ Bellcore, 445 South Street, Morristown, NJView Profile , Robert E. Kraut Bellcore, 445 South Street, Morristown, NJ Bellcore, 445 South Street, Morristown, NJView Profile , Barbara L. Chalfonte Bellcore, 445 South Street, Morristown, NJ Bellcore, 445 South Street, Morristown, NJView Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '90: Proceedings of the 1990 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative workSeptember 1990 Pages 1–11https://doi.org/10.1145/99332.99335Online:01 September 1990Publication History 177citation2,054DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations177Total Downloads2,054Last 12 Months142Last 6 weeks20 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

To work together on complex projects, people must agree on a set of shared goals, coordinate the actions of contributors, and weave the components they have created independently into a unified whole. These activities are the basic components of intellectual teamwork—people working together over substantial periods of time to create information-intensive products. Intellectual teamwork demands extensive information sharing and coordination, but these communication needs vary over time and over tasks. These projects typically involve an initial phase during which group members settle on an interpretation of the problem, define their goals and plan their work, an execution phase during which group members may work independently to carry out the various tasks associated with the project, and an integration phase during which group members must bring their individual inputs together to create a final product [Biks90; Finh90; Krau88; McGr90).These variations suggest that different communication modalities may be useful at successive stages in the life of a long-term project. A relatively static medium such as writing may be sufficient for exchanging information, but tasks that involve ambiguous goals, multiple perspectives, and information that is susceptible to multiple interpretations—characteristics of the planning and integrative phases of intellectual teamwork—are typically associated with high levels of direct, informal, face-to-face communication [Daft81; Daft87; Tush78, Tush79; Vand76]. Face-to-face interaction can support the rich communication required for integrative work, but creating the conditions to support face-to-face communication can be expensive, and sometimes, logistically impossible.Of course, other forms of communication—telephones, for instance—are available to counter these disadvantages. Telephones permit easy communication across both short and long distances, and they support naturalistic interaction embodying many of the features of Face-to-Face conversation. Nevertheless, as anyone who has ever played an extended game of “telephone tag” knows, they require the sender and the receiver to be simultaneously available. This limitation is inconsistent with current communication needs in business and science, both of which are becoming, on the one hand, more geographically and temporally distributed, and, on the other, more interconnected.

In this paper, we describe the influence of physical proximity on the development of collaborative relationships between scientific researchers and on the execution of their work. Our evidence is drawn from our own studies of scientific collaborators, as well as from observations of research and development activities collected by other investigators. These descriptions provide the foundation for a discussion of the actual and potential role of communications technology in professional work, especially for collaborations carried out at a distance.

Quilt is a computer-based tool for collaborative document production. It provides annotation, messaging, computer conferencing, and notification facilities to support communication and information sharing among the collaborators on a document. Views of a document tailored to individual collaborators or to other of the document's users are provided by Quilt based on the user's position in a permission hierarchy that reflects an extensible set of social roles and communication types. This paper illustrates how Quilt could be used by collaborators to produce a document.

What are the requirements on computer- and telecommunications-based tools to aid groups in producing intellectual products? In this article we examine research collaborations as a particularly informative example of group work and propose a framework for describing research collaboration that should provide guidance to those developing technology to support collaborative work. The framework is based on 50 semistructured interviews with researchers in psychology, management science, and computer science. It focuses on the problems in forming and maintaining personal relationships and completing tasks that researchers must solve to have a successful collaboration. These problems occur when collaborators are initiating projects, executing them, and documenting results.

Most computer-based aids for researchers and other workers have had individuals rather than groups or teams as their beneficiaries. This is unfortunate, since much work in business, government, and academia is performed by groups of people. In this paper we examine research collaborations as a particularly informative example of group work and propose a model of research collaboration that should provide guidance to those developing technology to support collaborative work. The model is based on 50 semi-structured interviews with researchers in psychology, management science, and computer science. It focuses on the problems in forming and maintaining personal relationships and completing tasks that researchers must solve to have a successful collaboration. These problems occur when collaborators are initiating projects, executing them, and documenting results.

To understand how people interact with powerful computer systems, we analyzed, using several multivariate statistical analyses, the commands people use and the errors they made when performing office work with the UNIX operating system.The frequency of use across commands was very uneven.Users' most frequent commands were those that performed editing-like functions on text and other objects (e.g., UNIX directories), those that returned orienting information to users, and those that helped to control and sequence other commands.People made mistakes frequently, and made them most, when they needed information about the command and file context in which they were working, and when they had to plan long sequences of commands without feedback.From these analyses we make several recommendations for a human-computer interface.

Designing a human interface to a computer system is more art than science. Systematic research on the human interface to computer systems, when it is performed, is generally an after-the-fact evaluation of an almost finished product. This sort of evaluation is often too specific to a particular product to provide general prescriptions for future interface design and often occurs too late to have a substantial impact on product development. Rarely do research and evaluation provide guidance throughout the development cycle.