We study how independent innovation teams develop an environment of inclusion to support gender diversity. Through a mixed-methods study involving surveys and interviews with people involved in independent innovation, we sought to better understand the mechanisms by which their teams fostered a sense of inclusion to support gender diversity via interpersonal practices and communication and collaboration technology usage. By understanding how inclusion supports gender diversity, we discuss design implications to help more diverse independent innovation teams form and function.

Social media systems promise powerful opportunities for people to connect to timely, relevant information at the hyper local level. Yet, finding the meaningful signal in noisy social media streams can be quite daunting to users. In this paper, we present and evaluate Whoo.ly, a web service that provides neighborhood-specific information based on Twitter posts that were automatically inferred to be hyperlocal. Whoo.ly automatically extracts and summarizes hyperlocal information about events, topics, people, and places from these Twitter posts. We provide an overview of our design goals with Whoo.ly and describe the system including the user interface and our unique event detection and summarization algorithms. We tested the usefulness of the system as a tool for finding neighborhood information through a comprehensive user study. The outcome demonstrated that most participants found Whoo.ly easier to use than Twitter and they would prefer it as a tool for exploring their neighborhoods.

With the increasing use of the Internet and social media for knowledge and social connections, we might expect that people more easily expand their opportunities for new learning through social relationships online. Yet, this mixed methods study of teens' use of technologies (e.g. YouTube and social media) in informal learning contexts reveals that, in teens' preferred learning activities, few interact with new ties outside their immediate networks (school, family, and friends). Given the value of social interaction and weak ties for learning new knowledge, this research investigates teens' use of networked technologies with people and resources outside their immediate networks. Based on 23 semi-structured interviews, we describe teens' informal learning activities and technology practices, from which we identify design opportunities. To inform these, we examine teens' paths into extended networks, including the role of digital skills, technology access, intrinsic motivation, and sense of relatedness. We find that relatedness both motivated and inhibited teens to reach beyond immediate networks into extended networks for informal learning activities.

Social media technologies provide unique channels to empower youth to become more civically engaged. Puget Sound Off is an online blogging and networking site focused on helping youth connect, collaborate, and take action around local community issues. We performed an evaluation study seeking lessons learned from a real world deployment. We found that a core group of youth became highly engaged with Puget Sound Off, and that both usage and identification with the community was positively correlated with civic engagement. Youth reported an appreciation for the opportunity for meaningful discussion around issues that mattered to them. We found however that growth of Puget Sound Off was slow, in part due to the constraints of deploying to youth in a real world context with concerns about inappropriate use. We end with recommendations for fostering growth and civic engagement in related social media technologies.

Current social media products such as Facebook and Twitter have not sufficiently addressed how to help users organize people and content streams across different areas of their lives. We conducted a qualitative design research study to explore how we might best leverage natural models of social organization to improve experiences of social media. We found that participants organize their social worlds based on life 'modes', i.e., family, work and social. They strategically use communication technologies to manage intimacy levels within these modes, and levels of permeability through the boundaries between these modes. Mobile communication in particular enabled participants to aggregate and share content dynamically across life modes. While exploring problems with managing their social media streams, people showed a strong need for focused sharing - the ability to share content only with appropriate audiences within certain areas of life.

This paper explores key issues people experience managing personal boundaries within and across social technologies. We look in particular at email and online social networks. We offer a theoretical framework for understanding the errors in assumptions about the singularity of identity that are currently inscribed into the sharing models of social technology systems. Through a questionnaire study we examine how people facet their identities and their lives, and how these facets are expressed through use of email and Facebook. We found family was an extremely important context for sharing online, and that email was still a preferred form of communication for private sharing across facets of life. Single, working men had the highest level of incompatible facets, and a higher level of facet incompatibility was correlated with increased email usage and worry about sharing in the context of social networks.

CoCollage is a placed-based community technology that leverages the power of online social networking to facilitate awareness and face-to-face interactions in a third place. We adapted standardized measures of place attachment, social networks and psychological sense of community to provide a framework grounded in the social science literature for studying real world adoption of place-based community technologies. We found the standardized measures of place attachment and psychological sense of community meaningfully predicted likelihood of technology adoption and usage in a café. We discuss some lessons learned from our initial deployment of CoCollage in a real-world setting to support a nascent place-based community.

In an empirical study we investigated how matchmaking for online gaming platforms could benefit from additional implicit information conveyed in profiles that include photos or voice recordings. We used 150 real online gamer profiles (50 text-only, 50 text & photo, 50 text & voice) to elicit gaming partner preferences from 267 online gamers. We found profiles with photos to lead to lower overall preference, indicating that people used them to reject potential partners. Voice recordings did not reduce overall preference but gave participants relevant information for gaming partner choice. We close with recommendations for the design of profile-based matchmaking systems.

To address the needs of cancer patients and their caregivers, Microsoft Research and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center developed HutchWorld, an online community environment, to provide computer-mediated social and informational support. In a controlled clinical study, we deployed HutchWorld to bone marrow transplant patients and their caregivers and assessed the impact of Internet access and HutchWorld on their quality of life. We found that Internet access and the use of HutchWorld helped to buffer study participants against reductions in life satisfaction and social support following the transplant procedure. In particular, participants used the Internet to seek out support from family and friends

In this paper, we examine what types of reputation information users find valuable when selecting someone to interact with in online environments. In an online experiment, we asked users to imagine that they were looking for a partner for a social chat. We found that similarity to the user and ratings from the user's friends were the most valuable pieces of reputation information when selecting chat partners. The context in which reputations were used (social chat, game or newsgroup) affected the self-reported utility of the pieces of reputation information

Web sites face difficult challenges in supporting successful communities. In this paper we discuss 2 operating web sites, identically designed but with different and distinct audiences. These sites collect user data from site activity and feed it back to the user community in novel ways. The sites are highly active and growing, and have fostered socially conscious, easily navigable and comprehensible on-line communities with little cost and maintenance. The practice of user data collection and re-purposing we describe works particularly well in highly contextual or information / resource-driven communities. These sites also integrate custom content authoring tools and track their use. The authoring tools were designed to quickly grow a specialized "knowledge base " of content created by users and published to a larger audience. In addition, a status system encourages the participation of users to contribute to this knowledge base, while simultaneously increasing social awareness and responsibility in areas of high user interaction. All user activity, communications, and feedback are tracked. Then data is compiled and reincorporated into scalable solutions for better navigability, content filtering, and presentation of contents to a larger audience. This practice creates a uniquely high quality of interaction within web communities.

One of the most robust findings in the sociological literature is the positive effect of communication on cooperation and trust. When individuals are able to communicate, cooperation increases significantly. How does the choice of communication modality influence this effect? We adapt the social dilemma research paradigm to quantitatively analyze different modes of communication. Using this method, we compare four forms of communication: no communication, text-chat, text-to-speech, and voice. We found statistically significant differences between different forms of communication, with the voice condition resulting in the highest levels of cooperation. Our results highlight the importance of striving towards the use of more immediate forms of communication in online environments, especially where trust and cooperation are essential. In addition, our research demonstrates the applicability of the social dilemma paradigm in testing the extent to which communication modalities promote the development of trust and cooperation.

This paper provides a unique quantitative analysis of the social dynamics of three chat rooms in the Microsoft V-Chat graphical chat system. Survey and behavioral data were used to study user experience and activity. 150 V-Chat participants completed a web-based survey, and data logs were collected from three V-Chat rooms over the course of 119 days. This data illustrates the usage patterns of graphical chat systems, and highlights the ways physical proxemics are translated into social interactions in online environments. V-Chat participants actively used gestures, avatars, and movement as part of their social interactions. Analyses of clustering patterns and movement data show that avatars were used to provide nonverbal cues similar to those found in face-to-face interactions. However, use of some graphical features, in particular gestures, declined as users became more experienced with the system. These findings have implications for the design and study of online interactive environments.

A quantitative research experiment was used to examine whether a group's computer-mediated decision-making could be improved by providing a scripted structure to the groups text chat discussion. The study compared a regular chat discussion to a scripted chat discussion using Lead Line, a program that allows people to add a layer of pre-authored structure to regular text chat. We found that groups were more likely to come to consensus in structured chat discussions. In addition, groups applied the structure they learned to subsequent regular chat sessions.