In citizen science, volunteers collect and share data with researchers, other volunteers, and the public at large. Data shared in citizen science includes information on volunteer location or other sensitive personal information; yet, volunteers do not typically express privacy concerns. This study uses the framework of contextual integrity to understand privacy accounting in the context of citizen science, by analyzing contextual variables including roles; information types; data flows and transmission principles; and, uses, norms, and values. Findings show that uses, norms, and values-including core values shared by researchers and public volunteers, and the motivations of individual volunteers' have a significant impact on privacy accounting. Overall, citizen science volunteers and practitioners share and promote openness and data sharing over protecting privacy. Studying the context of citizen science offers an example of contextually-appropriate data sharing that can inform broader questions about research ethics in an age of pervasive data. Based on these findings, this paper offers implications for designing data and information flows and supporting technologies in public and voluntary data sharing projects.

Citizen science broadly describes citizen involvement in science. Citizen science has gained significant momentum in recent years, brought about by widespread availability of smartphones and other Internet and communications technologies (ICT) used for collecting and sharing data. Not only are more projects being launched and more members of the public participating, but more human–computer interaction (HCI) researchers are focusing on the design, development, and use of these tools. Together, citizen science and HCI researchers can leverage each other’s skills to speed up science, accelerate learning, and amplify society’s well-being globally as well as locally. The focus of this article is on HCI and biodiversity citizen science as seen primarily through the lens of research in the author’s laboratory. The article is framed around five topics: community, data, technology, design, and a call to save all species, including ourselves. The article ends with a research agenda that focuses on these areas and identifies productive ways for HCI specialists, science researchers, and citizens to collaborate. In a nutshell, while species are disappearing at an alarming rate, citizen scientists who document species’ distributions help to support conservation and educate the public. HCI researchers can empower citizen scientists to dramatically increase what they do and how they do it.

Increasingly, adults and children socialise and communicate online. Children's safe and secure online communication with people from all over the world can increase their understanding of other cultures, which is an important goal in today's multicultural world. Our research studied such interactions between children from three countries, Hungary, Mexico, and the USA. The goals of our research were to study how children represent their identity online and what the implications are for the design of children's online communities. We used qualitative methods to derive a deep understanding of children's behaviours and motivations. Our results show that children exposed their true and complete identities online. They focused on sharing and learning about personal, ethnic, and gender identities via online media and largely ignored cultural identity. They learned about children from other countries and developed positive attitudes towards them. Based on our results we describe design guidelines for children's online identity tools.

The rising popularity of location-based applications and games (LBAGs) that break spatial, temporal, and social boundaries creates new challenges for designers. This paper introduces PLACE, an iterative, mixed-fidelity approach to Prototyping Location, Activities, Collective experience, and Experience over time in LBAGs. PLACE consists of 6 design principles: start small and scale up the fidelity, treat participants as co-designers, test in a representative space, focus on activities more than interfaces, respect authentic social experience, and represent time authentically. The effectiveness of PLACE was evaluated by prototyping Floracaching, a geocaching game for citizen science. This revealed the types of insights that PLACE provides, best practices for implementing PLACE, and how PLACE com-pares to other prototyping methods.

Online citizen science projects engage volunteers in collecting, analyzing, and curating scientific data. Existing projects have demonstrated the value of using volunteers to collect data, but few projects have reached the full collaborative potential of scientists and volunteers. Understanding the shared and unique motivations of these two groups can help designers establish the technical and social infrastructures needed to promote effective partnerships. We present findings from a study of the motivational factors affecting participation in ecological citizen science projects. We show that volunteers are motivated by a complex framework of factors that dynamically change throughout their cycle of work on scientific projects; this motivational framework is strongly affected by personal interests as well as external factors such as attribution and acknowledgment. Identifying the pivotal points of motivational shift and addressing them in the design of citizen-science systems will facilitate improved collaboration between scientists and volunteers.

This article explores the opportunities and challenges of creating and sustaining large‐scale “content curation communities” through an in‐depth case study of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL). Content curation communities are large‐scale crowdsourcing endeavors that aim to curate existing content into a single repository, making these communities different from content creation communities such as Wikipedia. In this article, we define content curation communities and provide examples of this increasingly important genre. We then follow by presenting EOL, a compelling example of a content curation community, and describe a case study of EOL based on analysis of interviews, online discussions, and survey data. Our findings are characterized into two broad categories: information integration and social integration. Information integration challenges at EOL include the need to (a) accommodate and validate multiple sources and (b) integrate traditional peer reviewed sources with user‐generated, nonpeer‐reviewed content. Social integration challenges at EOL include the need to (a) establish the credibility of open‐access resources within the scientific community and (b) facilitate collaboration between experts and novices. After identifying the challenges, we discuss the potential strategies EOL and other content curation communities can use to address them, and provide technical, content, and social design recommendations for overcoming them.

The use of computers for human-to-human communication among adults has been studied for many years, but using computer technology to enable children from all over the world to talk to each other has rarely been discussed by researchers. The goal of our research is to fill this gap and explore the design and evaluation of children’s cross-language online communities via a case study of the International Children’s Digital Library Communities (ICDLCommunities). This project supports the development of communities for children (ages 7–11) that form around the International Digital Children’s Library (ICDL) book collection. In this community the children can learn about each others’ cultures and make friends even if they do not speak the same language. They can also read and create stories and ask and answer questions about these. From this evaluation study we learned that: (i) children are very interested in their counterparts in other countries and a remarkable amount of communication takes place even when they do not share a common language; (ii) representing their identity online in many different forms is particularly important to children when communicating in an online community; (iii) children enjoy drawing but representing stories in a sequence of diagrams is challenging and needs support; and (iv) asking and answering questions without language is possible using graphical templates. In this paper we present our findings and make recommendations for designing children’s cross-cultural online communities.

The aim of this research is to develop an in-depth understanding of the dynamics of online group interaction and the relationship between the participation in an online community and an individual's off-line life. The 2½-year study of a thriving online health support community (Bob's ACL WWWBoard) used a broad fieldwork approach, guided by the ethnographic research techniques of observation, interviewing, and archival research in combination with analysis of the group's dynamics during a one-week period. Research tools from the social sciences were used to develop a thick, rich description of the group. The significant findings of this study include: dependable and reliable technology is more important than state-of-the-art technology in this community; strong community development exists despite little differentiation of the community space provided by the software; members reported that participation in the community positively influenced their offline lives; strong group norms of support and reciprocity made externally-driven governance unnecessary; tools used to assess group dynamics in face-to-face groups provide meaningful information about online group dynamics; and, membership patterns in the community and strong subgroups actively contributed to the community's stability and vitality.

The rapid growth of personal email communication, instant messaging and online communities has brought attention to the important role of interpersonal trust in online communication. An empirical study was conducted focusing on the effect of empathy on online interpersonal trust in textual IM. To be more specific, the relationship between empathic accuracy, response type and online interpersonal trust was investigated. The result suggests both empathic accuracy and response type have significant influence on online interpersonal trust. The interaction between empathic accuracy and response type also significantly influences online trust. Interestingly, the results imply a relationship between daily trust attitude and online interpersonal trust. People who are more trusting in their daily life may experience more difficulty in developing trust online. There is also some evidence to suggest that different communication scenarios may have an influence on online trust.

Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) is gaining momentum in many IT fields as computing technology increasingly impacts individuals, businesses, society, commerce and government throughout the world. M...

Social interactions in online communities are varied and often complex, as are the communities themselves. The characteristics of the people, the range of purposes they pursue, the type of governance policies they develop, and the design of the software supporting a community, vary from community to community. These characteristics determine a community's sociability. Thus, the availability of powerful analytic tools to help designers understand existing technology-supported social activity online can broaden the spectrum of design knowledge and promote new insights for designing computer applications of this sort. In this paper, we present one such analytic tool—a theoretically-based online community framework (OCF). In order to demonstrate the efficacy of the framework we elaborate on its communication constituent using semiotic theory to help us. This constituent is particularly important in the OCF because it addresses computer-mediated communication between community members, and also communication from interactive software designers to users via the software they design. This latter kind of communication can shape the community's experience to a considerable extent, as our analysis shows. The paper ends with an agenda for future research.

Using the Internet to conduct quantitative research presents challenges not found in conventional research. Paper-based survey quality criteria cannot be completely adapted to electronic formats. Electronic surveys have distinctive technological, demographic, and response characteristics that affect their design, use, and implementation. Survey design, participant privacy and confidentiality, sampling and subject solicitation, distribution methods and response rates, and survey piloting are critical methodological components that must be addressed. In this article, quality criteria for electronic survey design and use based on an investigation of recent electronic survey literature are presented. The application of these criteria to reach a hard-to-involve online population-nonpublic participants of online communities (also known as "lurkers")-and survey them on their community participation, a topic not salient to the purpose of their online communities is demonstrated in a case study. The results show that a hard-to-reach audience can be reached using the quality criteria that are most important for reaching these types of audiences. The results suggest how the use of some criteria may conflict and what researchers may experience when conducting electronic surveys in an online culture in which people are not tolerant of intrusions into online lives.

It was established early on in this study that a Language, Literacy and Culture Program (LLC) site is needed to keep the community connected. A community-centered design was considered, and implemented in the fall of 1999. The current study was implemented to assess why the site failed and what could be done to revive it. The findings of the current study indicated that the community did not develop as expected despite the team's effort to follow a community-centered approach. In this paper we consider the reasons for the site's failure, and what could be done to revitalize the community. Through surveys, and interviews it was determined that the community needed more active participation from the moderator and faculty. They also required a more interactive and better developed design, and special care should be taken to train the members who need it on the use of technology involved.

This research is concerned with understanding the role a long established and thriving health bulletin board plays in the lives of its members; the impact of usability and sociability issues on group process, and the membership roles, patterns of social interaction, and group dynamics exhibited in the community. An ethnographic research approach is taken in this study in combination with social network analysis, and Interaction Process Analysis. The paper describes the rational for this research approach and some preliminary findings. It appears that community members have created a mental model of the groups' dynamics that serves as the basis for their attraction and commitment to the community.

Little attention has focused so far on evaluating the success of online communities. This paper begins to identify some key determinants of sociability and usability that help to determine their success. Determinants of sociability include obvious measures such as the number of participants in a community, the number of messages per unit of time, members' satisfaction, and some less obvious measures such as amount of reciprocity, the number of on-topic messages, trustworthiness and several others. Measures of usability include numbers of errors, productivity, user satisfaction and others. The list is not exhaustive but it is intended to provide a starting point for research on this important topic that will lead to develop of metrics. To avoid creating false impressions it is advisable to use several measures and to triangulate with qualitative data, particularly from ethnographic studies.

As online groups grow in number and type, understanding lurking is becoming increasingly important. Recent reports indicate that lurkers make up over 90% of online groups, yet little is known about them.

Abstract The central tenet of HCI is to ensure that software and hardware design supports users doing their tasks. Most of the papers in this Special Issue go one step beyond designing for usability — they also address design issues related to supporting human values. As computer usage becomes more diverse both in terms of the range of users and types of applications, human values such as democracy will become increasingly important and controversial, especially, as the number of people coming onto the Internet increases. For example, the issue of computer haves and have nots is well known, but governments are only just starting to think through its implications in terms of future policy. In addition, understanding users' affective responses to systems and how emotions are conveyed across networks is starting to gain designers' attention. Brenda Laurel's company, Purple Moon, is a clear example of the perceived need of designing to support users' emotional needs, in this case, teenage girls.

The Web empowers a diverse population of users and this is reflected in both the demography and interests of today’s on-line communities. Many of these communities provide an essential social function by enabling people with medical or personal problems to discuss their concerns with others. Physicians can provide the facts, but other patients can tell you what it really feels like and what to expect next, in a way that only someone with personal experience can. A study of the messages from an on-line medical support group shows that empathy is an essential ingredient in participants’ discussions. Better tools are needed to empower patients to help themselves by finding information and contacting other patients in bulletin board communities. Suggestions about the nature of these tools are discussed. In particular, supporting a balance between empathic and factual communication is stressed.

Teachers need to be able to evaluate predictively educational software so that they can make decisions about what software to purchase and how to use software in classrooms. The conventional approach to predictive evaluation is to use a checklist. We argue that checklists are seriously flawed in principle because they do not encompass a consideration of learning issues. More particularly they fail to adopt a socio-constructivist view of learning. We propose an approach that adapts the idea of usability heuristics by taking account of a socio-constructivist learning perspective. This leads to a set of `learning with software' heuristics. A notable feature of these heuristics is that they attend to the integration of usability and learning issues.

With the increasingly rapid uptake of the World Wide Web, even those pages classed as ‘the best of the web’ are not immune to large download latencies. This paper investigates whether the latency between requesting a page and receiving it influence user perceptions of the page. The paper describes a study in which users are presented with seven different web pages with delays ranging from 2 s to 2 min, and are then asked to rate the pages on a number of criteria. Predetermined delays were injected into the page loading process. Pages which were retrieved faster were judged significantly more interesting than their slower counterparts. The implications for web page design are discussed.

The paper focuses upon informal communication over desktop video-conferencing software. Evidence is presented in support of video providing some form of shared perspective (otherwise known as the ‘video-as-data’ hypothesis) and questions are raised about users' media-coupling activities in an informal context. It is anticipated that further insight has been gained into the nature of informal mediated communication, and consequently the requirements of supporting technologies.

Marilyn Mantei, Thomas Hewett, Ken Eason, Jenny Preece; Report on the INTERACT '90 Workshop on Education in HCI: transcending disciplinary and national bou

Abstract This paper reports on HCI education and on issues in HCI needing resolution when developing a course in human-computer interaction. We also look at how HCI can be taught, particularly to professional engineers, scientists and managers, using distance teaching and predicated on students using their industrial base as a classroom and laboratory. The paper also draws a comparison between the practices of user-centred iterative software design and the way that our course was developed.

This paper describes the introductory wurse in Computer Science produced by the United Kingdom Open University.The wurse has a study time of 400 hours and is innovative in that all students must provide themselves with a Personal ComPuter.Access to the University is open in that students axe not required to have attained any particular level of education before being admitted to the university; entrance is awarded on a first come first served basis.Students study at home and many are employed in full-time jobs.The course is very popular and over 2200 students took the examination in 1988, suggesting that it is indeed one of the largest courses of its type.The paper also discusses the important logistical and academic problems of providing materials for several thous.andstudents to study using their own machines at home.