activating online collaborative communities
DESCRIPTION
Presentation given at ALOIS 2008 conference, Venice, Italy, May 5-6, 2008.TRANSCRIPT
Activating Online Collaborative Communities
Aldo de Moor CommunitySense
ALOIS 2008
Collaborative communities
Communities Strong, lasting interactions Binding community members Common space
Collaborative communities Common goals Effective/efficient communication essential
Perform/coordinate work Community governance structures/processes Sense of community
Communication support failure
Communication
Purposes
Productive Focused Sustained Evolving
Communication
Forms
Discussing Debating Questioning Consoling …
Community Context
Domains Purposes Activities
Communication
Support ?
Social
System
Technical
System
The problem No longer custom-designed communication support
systems Instead, systems of tools
Actual and intended use differ strongly Interaction complexities
R&D problem Not lack of motivation
Many self and other-oriented motives to get critical mass, e.g. in Wikipedia
Lack of activation Fragmentation of communicative acts across tool system
functionalities Objectives
1. Frame these activation problems2. Model socio-technical design solutions
Towards collaborative community activation
Collaborative community activation supporting the initiation, execution, and evaluation of
goal-oriented computer-mediated communication processes to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of collaboration
Approach Digital tutorial case Theoretical grounding
Language/Action Perspective Pragmatic Web Actability / Interactivity
Conceptual model of online collaborative communities
Collaboration patterns
Case: a digital tutorial community
Who 19 Information Management students
What create group report with design of parliamentary research
information system When
8 weeks + evaluation session (2004) How
Face-to-face lectures, parallel digital tutorial Tool system
Blackboard Set of blogs GRASS (Group Report Authoring Support System) Scoring tool
Authoring with GRASS
Authoring with GRASS (2)
Digital tutorial workflow
Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 5 Week 6 Week 7 Week 8
Theory interpretation (blogs)
Case information collection (blog)
Report authoring (GRASS)
Workflow meets tool system
GRASS
Theory
Blogs
Case
Blog
Collect info Discuss
Scoring Substantiate claims
Define questions Define/take positions Define arguments pro/con Edit report
Evaluate contributions
Results 63-page report created in 8 weeks by 18 authors Most students scored much higher than the minimum
required Survey among students
Digital tutorial better than face-to-face tutorial Overall design of tool system plus workflow adequate Blog posting/commenting plus GRASS position definition/taking
and argument creation functionalities easy to learn Problems
Blog creation easy, however, following what was happening too difficult Indented instead of sequential commenting preferred Fragmentation of discussion consided a major problem
→ ‘blog monitor’ helped to reduce sense of fragmentation and to increase participation
Activation lessons learnt
Incentives for individual students to participate Minimum score required Overview of current scores per student Vouchers
Improving the overview of activities within individual tools Indented instead of linear comments in blog
Creating “meta-tools” to keep overview of activities across tools “Blog monitor”
Modeling pragmatic communication processes
Theories Language/Action Perspective
Focus on communicative inter-actions Pragmatic Web
Applying appropriate web technologies to help improve the quality and legitimacy of collaborative, goal-oriented discourses in communities (Schoop et al 2006)
Build a socio-technical infrastructure that supports the negotiation of meaning and the coordination of action (Aakhus 2007)
Research question How to model activation in collaborative communities using
distributed tool systems?
Modeling “interactability”
Actability The ability to act and to support human action Promoting appropriate social behaviour, mediated by rules
and norms Many dimensions, such as “action potentiality”
The set of communicative actions the system affords and supports (Agerfalk 2004)
Interactivity The degree to which two or more communicating parties can
act on each other, the communication medium, and on the synchronization of these influences
Dimensions: active control, two-way communication, synchronicity
Active control problematic: gap between structural and experienced aspects
A conceptual model of online collaborative communities (1)
Tool system System of integrated and customized tools tailored to the
specific information, communication, and coordination requirements of a collaborative community
Co-evolves with usage context, specific to each community
Tool system levels Systems: “group report writing system” Tools: “blogs”, “courseware”, “authoring support tool” Modules: “position definition/taking”, “argument creation” Functions: “add argument pro”, “add argument con”
A conceptual model of online collaborative communities (2)
Usage context Goals
Activities: operationalized goals, with deliverable
“writing a group report” Aspects: abstract goals, across processes and structures
“legitimacy”, “efficiency” Actors
Detailed role ontologies
“Administrator”, “Facilitator”, “Member” “Position Defender”, “Argument Summarizer”, “Report
Conclusion Editor” Domains
Professional culture, work practices, …
Collaboration patterns
Patterns Define relatively stable solutions to recurring problems at
the right level of abstraction Collaboration patterns
Capture socio-technical lessons learnt in optimizing the effectiveness and efficiency of collaboration processes
Typology of collaboration patterns (De Moor 2006)
Goal patterns Communication patterns Information patterns Task patterns Meta-patterns
Collaboration pattern typology (1)
Goal patterns Capture community and individual objectives
“finished group report within two weeks”, “produce 3 arguments contra position X”
Collaboration pattern typology (2)
Communication patterns Communicative workflow and norm definitions describing
acceptable and desired communicative interactions (initiation, evaluation stages of comm. workflows)
“Each student must define positions and pro-arguments for an assigned report section. All students may comment on these positions, but assigned students must define arguments pro or con. At the end of this stage, all students must take the defined positions.”
Information patterns Conceptualizations of the content knowledge obtained
from knowledge production activities
“Each blog post and comment can be marked up with a category from a predefined list describing the topic of the discussion”
Collaboration pattern typology (3)
Task patterns Capture which information patterns are to be created in
particular steps in a communication process, describing the role of content (execution stage of comm. workflows)
“Each new blog post and comment is categorized by students playing the Discussion Summarizer role at the end of each day.”
Meta-patterns Conceptual patterns necessary to interpret, validate, link,
and assess the quality of other collaboration patterns
“Any goal pattern representing the topic of the report must have been discussed in a consensus-building communication pattern applying to all members of the digital tutorial community.”
The case: an information pattern
The case: an enabled communication pattern (before)
The case: an enabled communication pattern (after)
Quo vadis?
Activation of online collaborative communities not trivial The concept of activation needs to be better understood
LAP, PragWeb, actability, interactivity… Socio-technical design patterns in their infancy
Pragmatic argumentation structures Norm-driven activation mechanisms Other fields: community informatics, coordination
theory, CSCW, interoperability research, empirically grounded pattern languages, conceptual graphs…
The cybersky is the limit…
Communicating across virtual worlds