Download How Social is Social Participation

How Social is Social Participation?
Hang Ung, Anupriya Ankolekar – HP Labs, Social Computing Lab.
In all sorts of organizations of people, from communities to companies, the structure of social relationships
between people is essential to elicit the participation of individuals and to the effectiveness of the
organization as a whole. Ideally, these relationships are built on trust, reciprocal exchanges, and mutual
understanding. In online settings, the interactions between people are mediated by computers and networks,
and are, as a consequence, not as rich. Although there is a huge, mostly untapped, potential for online social
participation, you don't actually meet people online – outside of dating websites. You don't encounter familiar
faces as you do when wandering downtown or practicing golf. Most of the time, you barely know the identity
of the people you are interacting with. Therefore, online relationships between people tend to be more
tenuous. On the other hand, the need for attention and, more generally, the appetite for social interactions, is
sufficient to turn passive community members into active project contributors.
Therefore, two important lines of research in support of greater social participation are to:
i) explore how new systems and interfaces could create richer forms of connectedness and of presence; and,
ii) study existing online communities, to understand the factors that increase individual participation and
enhance collaborative efforts, whether in the nature of interactions between people or in the organizational
structure.
Specifically for i), potential ideas for research include:
 Develop a real-time presence and communication component. Contributing and communicating
online is essentially asynchronous. On the other hand, instant messaging and IRC-like group
discussion tools are functioning in real-time and define a basic form of presence (online vs. offline),
as well as statuses (e.g., available vs. busy). Enhancing our online presence, notably with the use of
video, could significantly impact social participation, and so would implementing real-time
collaborative tools – potentially built on new protocols like Google Wave.
 Make social participation of individuals within community projects like Wikipedia, forums, open
source development sites etc. visible, e.g. via a dashboard or a community profile, similar to a
Facebook profile. People can browse this page and follow a person's activities, and hopefully be
inspired to similarly participate online. In general, this should increase social capital within the social
network of the person.
 Enable people to see (potentially abstracted) activity traces of friends on a site, so that websites seem
less like isolated, lonely places and more like the busy thoroughfares they are.
As for ii), studying online communities can shed light on the rather general social and organizational
mechanisms, by which numerous individuals can effectively collaborate online, outside of a hierarchical
structure or a market. In particular, we perceive the following key areas for research:
 Investigation of the social structure formed by interacting users, how it is constructed and how it
evolves over time, and the effects of this structure on the outcomes of their projects. In addition, as
we gain detailed data on the movements of people across projects, investigate the factors that cause
people to join a project or leave it for another one. Specifically, we intend to identify and characterize
the multiple sub-communities within large, well-established, umbrella projects like Wikipedia or the
Apache Software Foundation. One important challenge is to integrate the multiple levels of
interactions between users:
o in open source development, through mailing-lists and forums, source code repository, and
bug-tracking system;
o for Wikipedia, within the different 'namespaces', e.g. articles, talk pages, projects and portals,
Wikipedia project, user profiles pages, etc.

Understanding why people migrate to other projects will also help in the design of appropriate
interventions to support people in making good decisions. E.g. if a contributor feels redundant or
unappreciated in a community, a message from a core member recognizing their contributions might
make all the difference. It is usually difficult for core members to keep track of which contributions
come from which people, so a system that automatically detects fading contributions and highlights
contributions of a particular member in a sort of dashboard might be very useful.
 Developing simple and effective mechanisms to gather and reconcile the opinions and ideas of a
large number of people. Many companies and online communities seek to crowdsource ideas from
their users, their employees or the Web community as a whole. Prominent examples are Starbucks,
the Google Project 10^100, but also open source development projects that want to understand how
feature requests should be prioritized, based on their users’ input. Most existing mechanisms to
gather this kind of information are informal and primitive, relying primarily on emails, messages and
polls. These have the disadvantage of being rather tedious to triage. In addition, there is hardly any
incentive for people to build on each other’s ideas, which becomes a substantial problem when the
ideas and opinions are contributed by the Web community at large. Systems like Google Moderator
are great attempts to address this problem, but still fall short in presenting the ideas meaningfully to
people or allowing people to build on each other’s ideas.
 Investigating the tradeoff between involving the entire community in decisions, as discussed above,
and restricting decision-making power in the hands of a few. Online communities like Wikipedia tend
to restrict participation of infrequent or new contributors in decision-making that affects the whole
community, e.g. deciding which pages get promoted as featured pages, whether a certain contributors
is given access to the software repository etc. These contributors are not yet inculcated into the
norms and policies of the project, potentially distorting or muddying the decisions of the community.
However, these people are also typically looking for ways to contribute and help the community and
allowing them greater participation in decision-making is likely to make them feel more invested in
the community and increase their motivation to contribute. By studying various online communities,
we can come to a better understanding of the nature of the tradeoff and its effects on the success of
online communities.
This line of research lies at the intersection of a) the fast-developing literature on hybrid forms of online
organizations, which stems from the question of the firm boundaries, addressed initially by Coase and
significantly later developed by Williamson, and b) the concepts of social capital and embeddedness, originally
studied by sociologists, but now widely invoked in political sciences, economics and organizational sciences as
well.
Infrastructure
The research we have outlined requires a sophisticated infrastructure to mine and analyze large amounts of
community data. We are considering different methods to address this challenge, including network dynamic
theory, NLP and in particular sentiment analysis, as well as mathematical models. So far, we are in the process
of retrieving and pre-processing the data.
Regarding Wikipedia, we are working on setting up an efficient computation cluster to perform potentially
complex analysis on the full text history of Wikipedia. The current experiments, running on 300 CPUs and a
2.7 terabytes dataset, show promising performance.