To understand information accessibility issues, research has examined human and technical factors by taking a socio‐technical view. While this view provides a profound understanding of how people seek, use, and access information, it often overlooks the larger structure of the information landscapes that shape people's information access. However, theorizing the information landscape of a local community at the community level is challenging because of the diverse contexts and users. One way to minimize the complexity is to focus on the materiality of information. By highlighting the material aspects of information, it becomes possible to understand the community‐level structure of local information. This paper develops a theory of local information landscapes (LIL theory) to conceptualize the material structure of local information. LIL theory adapts a concept of the virtual as an ontological view of the local information that is embedded in technical infrastructures, spaces, and people. By complementing existing theories, this paper provides a new perspective on how information deserts manifest as a material pre‐condition of information inequality. Based on these theoretical models, a research agenda is presented for future studies of local communities.

International students face various challenges in their new countries, but research is less clear about their challenges in information behaviors. This article fills this gap by examining information behaviors of international newcomer students during adjustment to local environments, that is, local information behavior (LIB). Drawing on prior work, we focus on the local co‐national context—the degree to which there are co‐nationals available in one's local environments—to analyze the LIBs of 149 first‐year graduate students and 57 follow‐up interviewees, who were classified into: International‐common group (students from China, India, and Korea—with many local co‐nationals), International‐less‐common group (students from other countries—with fewer local co‐nationals), and Domestic‐out‐of‐state group (students from other U.S. states; control group). We identify differences in international newcomer students' use of information sources during adjustment and the role that local co‐national contexts play in these differences. These results suggest ways that information scholars and practitioners might account for the influences of local co‐national contexts when examining information behaviors of internationally mobile students and designing systems and services for newcomers from around the world.

The Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) is an online, open education platform where any user can create a course, contribute content, or join an existing course as a learner. P2PU represents an experiment in organizing the production of entirely user-generated, open education. However, the open model of P2PU rests on the critical assumption that members can successfully coordinate and produce a sufficient supply of courses and motivate others to join in. In this paper, we use log data from P2PU to describe the dynamics of organizers -- members who try to produce and launch open courses -- and explore the factors related to their ability to successfully create courses on this open platform. We find that a critical predictor of successful course development is quickly finding like-minded organizers to collaborate with, suggesting that creating new education systems based on open, social computing platforms requires facilitation of key aspects of social coordination beyond providing platform and content resources.

Faced with highly competitive and dynamic environments, organizations are increasingly investing in technologies that provide them with new options for structuring work. At the same time, firms are increasingly dependent on employees' willingness and ability to make sense of novel tasks, problems, and rapidly changing situations. Yet, in spite of its importance, the impact of technology‐enabled distributed work arrangements on sensemaking behavior is largely unknown. Sensemaking remains something that is perceived by many to be an idiosyncratic behavior that is, at best, loosely related to sociotechnical context and culture. Drawing on previous studies of cognitive dispositions (need for cognition, tendency for decisiveness, intolerance for ambiguity, and close‐mindedness) and research on how technology‐enabled distributed work arrangements affect interpersonal interaction, we theorize how workgroup geographic distribution interacts with individual cognitive differences to affect employees' willingness to engage in the core sociocognitive activities of sensemaking. Our results show that the consequences of individual tendencies can vary under different work arrangements, suggesting that managers seeking to facilitate sensemaking activities must make careful choices about the composition of distributed work groups, as well as how collaboration technologies can be used to encourage sensemaking behaviors.

This full-day workshop focuses on building Big Social Data research competencies for scholars interested in issues of contribution quality and contributor performance in online co-production systems that generate value through contributions by volunteers. The workshop is designed to engage discussion and promote co-working through a hackathon format to stimulate productive conversation and learning, using shared data sets to provide a common focus for participants to engage questions of contribution quality and contributor performance with multiple disciplinary, theoretical, and analytical backgrounds.

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

While there is significant potential for social technologies to strengthen local communities, creating viable online spaces for them remains difficult. Maintaining a reliable content stream is challenging for local communities with their bounded emphases and limited population of potential contributors. Some systems focus on specific information types (e.g. restaurant, events). Others allow many different information types. This paper reports our findings about the consequences of content diversity from a study of neighborhood-oriented Facebook groups. The findings raise questions about the viability of designs for local online communities that focus narrowly on single topics, goals, and audiences.

Science in general, and biomedical research in particular, is becoming more collaborative. As a result, collaboration with the right individuals, teams, and institutions is increasingly crucial for scientific progress. We propose Research Networking Systems (RNS) as a new type of system designed to help scientists identify and choose collaborators, and suggest a corresponding research agenda. The research agenda covers four areas:foundations, presentation, architecture, andevaluation. Foundations includes project-, institution- and discipline-specific motivational factors; the role of social networks; and impression formation based on information beyond expertise and interests. Presentation addresses representing expertise in a comprehensive and up-to-date manner; the role of controlled vocabularies and folksonomies; the tension between seekers' need for comprehensive information and potential collaborators' desire to control how they are seen by others; and the need to support serendipitous discovery of collaborative opportunities. Architecture considers aggregation and synthesis of information from multiple sources, social system interoperability, and integration with the user's primary work context. Lastly, evaluation focuses on assessment of collaboration decisions, measurement of user-specific costs and benefits, and how the large-scale impact of RNS could be evaluated with longitudinal and naturalistic methods. We hope that this article stimulates the human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, and related communities to pursue a broad and comprehensive agenda for developing research networking systems.

Many information portals are adding social features with hopes of enhancing the overall user experience. Invitations to join and welcome pages that highlight these social features are expected to encourage use and participation. While this approach is widespread and seems plausible, the effect of providing and highlighting social features remains to be tested. We studied the effects of emphasizing social features on users' response to invitations, their decisions to join, their willingness to provide profile information, and their engagement with the portal's social features. The results of a quasi-experiment found no significant effect of social emphasis in invitations on receivers' responsiveness. However, users receiving invitations highlighting social benefits were less likely to join the portal and provide profile information. Social emphasis in the initial welcome page for the site also was found to have a significant effect on whether individuals joined the portal, how much profile information they provided and shared, and how much they engaged with social features on the site. Unexpectedly, users who were welcomed in a social manner were less likely to join and provided less profile information; they also were less likely to engage with social features of the portal. This suggests that even in online contexts where social activity is an increasingly common feature, highlighting the presence of social features may not always be the optimal presentation strategy.

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

Prior work has demonstrated that the impact of individual information-processing limits can be observed in dynamics of mass interaction in asynchronous collaborative systems (Usenet newsgroups and email lists). Here we present the first evidence of such impacts on synchronous social interaction environments through the analysis of an Internet Relay Chat network. We highlight how shared public discourse in chat channels appears to be limited to 40 posters in any 20 minute interval, even as the number of channel users increases well into the hundreds. We discuss our findings in terms of understanding the relationship between online community space types and the user interaction dynamics they support.

Choosing the most appropriate collaborators is becoming increasingly crucial to biomedical research as many research questions evolve into complex and multidisciplinary projects. Despite a growing emphasis on translational and interdisciplinary research, little is known about how biomedical researchers form collaborations. We conducted 27 semistructured interviews with scientists from the University of Pittsburgh, used grounded theory methodology to identify major themes, and compared these themes to the literature in order to develop a model of how biomedical researchers establish collaborations. We identify and discuss four major aspects of collaboration: motivation for collaboration, evaluation of prospective collaboration partners, search and selection, and barriers to collaboration formation.

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.