ICWSM Resnick tutorial2012

Evidenced-Based Social Design of
Online Communities

Robert E. Kraut
Carnegie Mellon University

Paul Resnick
University of Michigan

http://slidesha.re/ResnickICWSM12

Agenda

• Our approach & nature of design claims (10 minutes)
• The challenge of contribution (90 min)
– Requests, goals & motivation (55 minutes)
– Design challenge (15 minutes)
– Break
– Debrief (20 minutes)
• Starting a community (80 minutes)
– Network externalities & getting to critical mass (45 minutes)
– Design challenge (15 minutes)
– Debrief (20 minutes)

Today’s goals

• Introduction to view of social design based on social
science theory and empirical results
• Application to
– Challenges of encouraging contribution to online groups
– Challenges of starting a community from scratch
• Format: Lecture combined with break-out groups for
design exercises

Instructors
• Paul Resnick
– Professor, School of Information,
University of Michigan
– Computer scientist by training
• Economics orientation
– 2 years in industry at AT&T
• Robert Kraut
– Herbert A. Simon Professor of HCI
at Carnegie Mellon
– Social psychologist by training
– 12 years in industry at Bell Labs
and Bellcore
– Emphasis on social computing

Online communities face challenges
typical of off-line groups

• Community start-up
• Recruit, select and socialize members
• Encourage commitment
• Elicit contribution
• Regulate behavior
• Coordinate activity

But anonymity, weak ties, high turnover, & lack of
institutionalization make challenges more daunting online

Evidence-based Social Design
• Mine the rich empirical and theoretical literatures in
psychology and economics
• Develop design claims
– Hypotheses about the effects of social design decisions
• Sometimes directly tested in the online context and
sometimes only extensions of empirically tested
theories developed in offline settings

Inspiration

―There is nothing so
practical as a good theory‖

―If you want to understand Kurt Lewin
something, try to change it‖

The Roles of Theory and Evidence

• Identify Challenges
• Generate Solution Ideas
• Predict Consequences

Design Claims

• Our approach is to translate relevant social science
theory and empirical research to design claims

• Alternative X helps/hinders achievement of goal Y
under conditions Z

• E.g.,
– Coupling goals with specific deadlines leads to increases in
contributions as the deadlines approach
– Group goals elicit contribution most among people who
identify with the group

Design Claims Differ from Pattern
Languages
• Design pattern: a formal way of documenting a
solution to a design problem in a particular field of
expertise.

• May or may not document the reasons why a problem
exists and why the solution is a good one
• Captures the common solutions, but not necessarily
the effective ones

Design Levers

• Community structure
• Content, tasks & activities
• Selection, sorting & highlighting
• External communication
• Feedback & rewards
• Roles, rules, policies and procedures
• Access controls
• Presentation and framing

Online Communities Face Challenges
Typical of Off-line Groups

• Community start-up
• Recruit, select and socialize members
• Encourage commitment
• Elicit contribution
• Regulate behavior
• Coordinate activity
But anonymity, weak ties, high turnover, & lack of institutionalization make
challenges more daunting online

Reasons To Care
• Overall goal. Creating sufficient volume of contribution of the
resources the group values to provide benefits to group members
and others who rely upon the online community

• Different communities require different types of contribution
– Social support forums: Conversational acts, empathy, offers of help
– Recommender systems: Votes, opinions, comments
– Facebook: Invites, accepts, wall posts, pictures
– WoW guild: Time, particular skills
– Threadless: T-shirt designs
– OSS: Patches, code, translations, documentation
– Wikipedia: New articles, facts, copy-editing, administration work,
cash (& recently, letters to congressmen)

Under Contribution Is Rampant
• Across many Internet domains, a small fraction of
participants contribute the majority of material
– Code in open source projects
– Edits in Wikipedia
– Illegal music in Gnutella
– Answers in technical support groups
• Often leads to a power-law/Zipf curve distribution

• In many cases uneven contribution leads to an under
supply of needed content. E.g.,
– Assessments and content in Wikipedia
– Reviews of art movies in MovieLens

Wikipedia Stubs & Unassessed Articles
• Many Wikipedia articles haven‘t been assessed for
quality or importance
• 58% of important ones are of low quality

Association for Psychological
Science Wikipedia Initiative

APS/WI Reviewing Goal

• Subgoal: Get psychologists & grad students to review
Wikipedia articles by adding comments to article talk
pages describing problems with an article
• ~300 have signed up for the APSWPI, improving >
700 articles
• But fewer than 15 have reviewed
• How you can apply any of the design claims
presented here to increase these reviews from APS
members?

First attempt – Directed messages

Second attempt

• Simplifying the task
– Direct link to where the action is needed
• Highlighting ―social identity‖ in the invitation message
• Personalizing the message
– Specifying users‘ expertise
• Phrasing the task as ―rating‖ instead of ―reviewing‖

Naïve Task Analysis of Online
Contribution

To get people to contribute
needed content :
1. They need to understand
what is wanted
2. They have to be
competent to provide it
3. They have to be
motivated to provide it

Naïve Task Analysis of Online
Contribution

To get people to contribute
needed content :
1. They need to understand
what is wanted Requests, matching,
2. They have to be and goal setting
competent to provide it
3. They have to be theories of motivation
motivated to provide it • Extrinsic
• Intrinsic
• Effects of
social
situations

Requests, Matching, and Goal Setting

Requests Focus Attention on Needed
Contributions
• Make the list of needed contributions easily visible to
increase the likelihood that the community will provide
them

Identify Who Should Make The Contribution
• Request help in a chat room
• ―Can you tell me how to see someone‘s profile‖

– 400 Chat rooms
– DV=Time to response

• People are slower to respond when others are present
• Diffusion of responsibility is reduced when people are called by name

80 80
No name Name
70 70
Time to respond (seconds)
Time to respond (seconds)

60 No name
60

50 50

40 40

30 30

20 20

10
10
0
0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
Others present
Others present
Markey(2000)

Email Request to Contribute to Movielens
Quadruples Ratings

• In week after email reminder, contributes quadrupled, to ~ 20 ratings/person from
~5.4
• Is this sustainable?

Ask: Explicitly Asking for Needed Contributions
Increases Likelihood of Getting Them
• News site with a ―Leave a
comment‖ form at the end of
each article
• Fewer than 0.1% leave Comments by Type of Request
comments
No ask
• Experiment to estimate the Immediate
value of explicit requests Delayed

– No ask: ―Leave a comment‖ 0 20 40 60 80
Number of comments
100 120

form at end of article
(Wash & Lampe, 2012)
– Immediate: Pop-up ―Leave
a comment‖ when user
opens article
– Delayed: Pop-up ―Leave a
comment‖ on closing article

Ask Someone Who Is Willing & Able to
Help: Intelligent Task Routing (Cosley, 2007)

Suggestions Quadruple Editing Rates

Goal Setting Theory
• Goals motivate effort, perseverance & performance
– Trigger for both self-reward (e.g., self-efficacy) & external reward
(e.g., money, reputation, promotion)
• Goals are more effective if
– Specific & challenging rather than easy goals or vague ‗do your
best‘
– Immediate, with feedback
– People commit selves to the goals – because of
importance, incentives, self-esteem, …
– People envision the specific circumstance & method they will
use to achieve them

• Design claim: Providing members with specific and
highly challenging goals, whether self-set or system-
suggested, increases contribution.

Experiment Showing that Goals
Work:

• Send email to ~900 MovieLens subscribers
– Gave non-specific, do your best goal or specific, numerical
contribution goals
– Assigned goal to individual subscribers or a nominal group
of 10 subscribers (the ―Explorers‖)

Goal Experiment Results

• Results
– Specific, challenging goals increased contribution
– Group assignment increased contributions

In-game Goals in WoW
Weekly minutes playing World of Warcraft, by level

• In WoW players receive extra powers each 10-
levels implicit goals setting
• Ducheneaut, N., et al.(2007). The life and death of online gaming communities: A look
at guilds in world of warcraft. in SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing
systems. San Jose, California, USA.

Featured Status in Wikipedia as a
Challenge

Wikipedia edits before and after reaching featured status

WikiProjects Use Collaborations of the Week
(COTW) as Time-Delimited Goals
Get designated to good status in a defined
period (e.g., a week or a month)
A COTW announcement in a project page

An example template identifying an article as a COTW

39

Goal doubles contribution
Edits per person on the
collaboration articles Self-identified group members

Non self-identified members

Pre-Collaboration Collaboration Post-Collaboration
40

Goal has much larger effect on group
members
Edits per person on the
collaboration articles Self-identified group members

Non self-identified members

Pre-Collaboration Collaboration Post-Collaboration
41

Goals and Identity

• Design claim: Goals have a more powerful effects
when achieving them benefits a group the target
identifies with

• Association for Psychological Science Wikipedia
Initiative appeals to PhD psychologists with this
technique

Design Claims Re: Goals
• Providing members with specific and highly
challenging goals will increase their contributions.
• Goals have larger effects when people receive
frequent feedback about their performance with
respect to the goals.
• Externally imposed goals can be as effective as self-
imposed ones, as long as the goals are important to
community members
• Time-delimited challenges enhance the effects of
goals
• Combining goals with appeals to social identity
enhances their effects

What Motivates Contributors?
• Intrinsic value of task
(e.g., fun, curiosity, challenge)
• External personal value
– Reinforcement
– Pay
– Privilege
…
• Social utility
– Reputation
– Identification with the group
– Reciprocity
– Altruism
…

These are leverage points for interventions to
increase motivation

Value-Expectancy Model Provides Leverage
Points for Reducing Social Loafing

3
individual individual
performance outcome

5
3, 4
individual 4 individual individual
effort utility motivation

6 6
group group
performance outcome

Value-Expectancy Model Provides Leverage
Points for Reducing Social Loafing
Frame request consistent with user’s
values
Create incentives user values
3 Extrinsic
individual individual Intrinsic
performance outcome

5
3, 4
individual 4 individual individual
effort utility motivation

6 6
group group
performance outcome Liking for group members
Identification with group
History of interaction with group

Number of others
Own competence
Own unique skills
Group’s
incompetence

Imagine you wanted labels for web
images. How can you motivate people?

Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivations
• Individual motivation influences behavior through external
motivators (e.g., rewards, incentives, reputation) and intrinsic
motivators (e.g., fun & curiosity)
Increase contributions by manipulating extrinsic incentives & intrinsic
motivations

– Extrinsic motivators: Offer rewards as incentive
(e.g., money, reputation, perks, grades)
• Larger rewards induce more contribution than smaller rewards.
• Luxury goods create better incentives than money as rewards for
more difficult tasks.
• Rewards of status, privileges, money, or prizes that are task-
contingent but not performance-contingent will lead to gaming by
performing the tasks with low effort.
• People won't game the system for private verbal reward
– Intrinsic motivators: Make the task fun or intrinsically interesting

Financial Incentives on Threadless

Incentives vs. Reinforcements

• Incentives are promises given before the behavior
to cause people to produce it
• Reinforcements are rewards given after a
behavior that make it persist

Design Claims Re: Incentives &
Reinforcement
• Incentive Effects
– People do more of the behaviors that they anticipate will be
rewarded.
– Task non-contingent rewards will not create incentive to do more of
a task or exert more effort in doing it
– Larger rewards induce more contribution than smaller rewards
– Small gifts create more effective incentives than small payments
• Reinforcement effects
– Rewards delivered in response to behaviors cause people to do
more of those behaviors
– Rewards work better as reinforces if they are delivered right after
the desired behavior
– Rewards generate more consistent performance over time if they
are unpredictable

Intrinsic Motivators

• Intrinsic motivation is the process of working to
achieve the rewards that that come from carrying out
an activity rather from as a result of the activity.
• Comes from the pleasure one gets from the task itself
or from the sense of satisfaction in completing or
working on a task.

Redesign the task to make it more fun or interesting

ESP Game To Label Images
Truck
Red school bus

Red

Red school bus
• Example of playing the game
• Taboo words

How would you make a contribution
task more fun?

What Makes a Contribution Fun?
Lessons from game design
Flow Criteria Principles of game design

Concentration Games should require concentration and the player should be able to concentrate
on the game

Challenge Be sufficiently challenging and match the player’s skill level

Skills Support player skill development and mastery

Control Support players sense of control over their actions

Clear Goals Provide the player with clear goals at appropriate time

Feedback Provide appropriate feedback at appropriate times

Immersion Players should experience deep but effortless involvement in the game

Social Interaction Games should support and create opportunities for social interaction

Mapping flow to principles of game design (from Sweetser & Wyeth, 2005)

Support Opportunities for Social
Interaction

Make tedious tasks fun via social interaction

Gamification
• Applying game-design thinking to non-game
applications
• Is the effect via fun (internal motivation) or
incentives (external motivations)?

Design Claims Re: Trade-offs Btw Intrinsic
& Extrinsic Motivation
• Adding a reward to an already interesting task will
cause people to be less interested in the task and to
perform it less often.
• While tangible rewards reduce intrinsic motivations for
interesting activities, verbal rewards enhance intrinsic
motivation.
• Verbal rewards will not enhance intrinsic motivation
and may undermine it while they are judged as
controlling.
• Verbal rewards enhance intrinsic motivations most
when they enhance the target‘s perceptions of
competence

Design Jam
• Groups of 4
• Task
– Redesign of one thing of
• request for review,
• reviewing page on APS/WI site
– Sample Interface for reviewing page:
http://hciresearch2.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/~rfarzan/wikipedia/tool/re
view/review.php?&cond=1 (also on next slide)
– Say which slides justify your proposal.
– Mockup your proposal.
– 15 minutes for Jam
– Readout
• Show your mockup and narrate it: 1 minute!

Externalities
• Alice's adoption or production decisions have direct
or indirect effects on Bob's adoption or production
decisions
• Alice's decisions create costs and benefits external to her
• e.g., Size of telephone, email, and fax networks
• e.g., Complementary products—hardware & software
• e.g., Second hand smoke & other pollution

Positive Externalities in Napster

• Probability of a song appearing on Napster increased
with the number of users, at a declining rate

Negative Externalities in Napster

• Measures of congestion in Napster increased with the
number of users, at an increasing rate

Network Externalities in OLCs

• Negative externalities
– Server congestion; competition for attention
• Positive externalities
– People to interact with
– Content they produce
– Identity value

Implications of Positive Network
Externalities

• Winner-take-all competition between networks
• Need for critical mass
– minimum number of users that makes others want to join (or
not quit)

Startup Phase Challenges

• Identifying a Niche
• Defending the Niche
• Getting to Critical Mass

Getting to Critical Mass

• Leveraging Early Members
• Attracting Early Members

Join Now or Wait?

• Early members especially important
• Model provides insights into how to attract
utility (join now) =
participation_benefitstage1
- startup_cost
+ success_probability * (participation_benefitstage2 + early_adopter_benefit)

utility(wait) =
success_probability * (participation_benefitstage2 - startup_cost)

• Join now if utility(join_now) > utility(wait)
utility(join now) - utility(wait) =
– startup_cost * (1 – success_probability)
+ early_adopter_benefit * success_probability

Implications: Where to Look for Solutions

• Increase immediate benefits

util(join now) - util(wait) =
– startup_cost
* (1 – success_probability)
+ (early_adopter_benefit *
success_probability)


• Reduce effort to join
util(join now) - util(wait) =
– startup_cost


• Promise future benefits to util(join now) - util(wait) =
early adopters participation_benefitstage1
– startup_cost


– startup_cost
• Set expectations: probability * (1 – success_probability)
of success + (early_adopter_benefit *


– startup_cost
• Conditional commitments


– startup_cost
• What's not worth focusing
on
– Expectation setting: stage 2
value if successful


• Increase immediate
benefits
• Reduce effort to join util(join now) - util(wait) =
• Promise future benefits to participation_benefitstage1
– startup_cost
early adopters * (1 – success_probability)
• Set expectations: + (early_adopter_benefit *
probability of success
on
value if successful

Increase Immediate Benefits

• DC25: Productivity, Entertainment or Commerce
– E.g., Flickr offers picture storage and
management, services that are useful to the user even
if nobody else is using Flickr.
• DC26: Professionaly generated content
• DC27: Syndicated content
• DC28: Professional staff contributions

45 300
Staff posts
40
Member posts
250
35 Active members

Current member count
30 Key Dates 200
Messages posted

25
150
20

15 100

10
50
5

0 0
Contest 1

Contest 2

Contest 5

Fishtanks
Contest 6
Feb 15

Thread 1

Thread 2
Contests 3, 4

Resnick, Paul, Janney, Adrienne, Buis, Lorriane R, and Caroline R Richardson, ―Adding
an online community to an Internet-mediated walking program. Part 2: Strategies for
encouraging community participation‖. Journal of Medical Internet Research. 2010.
12(4):e72.

Increase Immediate Benefits

• DC25: Productivity, Entertainment or Commerce
• DC26: Professionally generated content
• DC27: Syndicated content
• DC28: Professional Staff contributions
• DC30: (as a last resort)
• DC31: Bots

Promise future benefits to early adopters

• DC 32: Future discounts to the early adopters
– E.g., lower rates for life
• DC 35: Limited resources that tempt users to join early
– E.g., status & recognition with being an early adopter
– E.g., users sign up first to claim their username
• DC 36: Privileges
– E.g., administrator status
• Identity rewards
– "Won't you be proud that you helped this get off the ground?"

Expectation Setting:
Presenting Success at Different Stages

• DC43: Small and slow growing
– Display new members and content
• DC44: Small and fast growing
– Display percentage growth
• DC45: Big
– Display absolute numbers

Summary

• The Challenges
– Identifying a Niche
– Defending the Niche
– Getting to Critical Mass
• Leveraging Early Members
• Attracting Early Members

Attracting Early Members
• Increase immediate
benefits
• Promise future benefits util(join now) - util(wait) =
to early adopters participation_benefitstage1
– startup_cost *
• Set expectations: (1 – success_probability)
probability of success + (early_adopter_benefit *
• Conditional success_probability)

commitments
on
value if successful

Challenge: Make Design Suggestions for
Getting a Specific Community to Critical
Mass
• SuccessfulOnlineCom • Increase immediate
munities.com benefits
• Or a community that • Promise future
someone in your benefits to early
group is trying to adopters
launch • Set expectations:
probability of
success
• Conditional
commitments

More information

Robert Kraut Paul Resnick
robert.kraut@cmu.edu presnick@umich.edu
www.cs.cmu.edu/~kraut presnick.people.si.umich.edu

ICWSM Resnick tutorial2012

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