Designing for Improved Social Responsibility, User Participation and Content in On-Line Communities Sean Uberoi Kelly Social Computing Group, Microsoft Research 1 Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052 USA +1 425 705 2736
[email protected] ABSTRACT
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. Keywords
Community, navigability, context, social awareness, feedback, social responsibility, user participation, trust, reputation INTRODUCTION
There are 3 major questions facing designers of on-line communities: how to get users to behave well, how to get users to contribute quality content, and how to get users to return and contribute on an ongoing basis. This paper discusses techniques used in 2 unique web sites that can provide some design strategies for meeting these challenges effectively. We will describe the background of the sites and their components, examine basic usage information, and describe in detail the nature of the data collected from users.
Christopher Sung eTonal Media, inc. 5 Peter Cooper Road Suite 4C NY, NY 10010 +1 212 228 6794
[email protected] We then discuss specifically how the sites use that data to effect improved social responsibility and awareness, active participation, and ease of navigation and filtering for desired content. Background
eTonal Media, a small New York-based media company, owns and operates two community-based websites geared towards music and education. WholeNote (www.Wholenote.com) caters to guitarists, while ActiveBass (www.ActiveBass.com) serves the bassist community. The concept for these free community and resource sites was originally developed as a joint graduate thesis project by the authors of this paper at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University in 1998. Wholenote was launched to the public in July, 1999 and ActiveBass 6 months later. These sites were designed to provide unique musical knowledge collections on line, and grow the collections cheaply and quickly from user-generated content. In order to achieve this, communities were designed specifically to meet these goals. Such highly context-sensitive communities differ in many respects from well known geographic/social ones such as New York’s EchoNyc or San Francisco’s The Well, in that they center users from any location and background around a particular and often intentionally narrow topic of interest. The close user identification with that topic tends to produce interactions with others that reinforce concepts that define community itself, i.e. membership, relationships, reciprocity, shared values and practices, collective goods, duration over time, etc.[1] While providing most of the standard services one expects from an on-line community (such as discussion forums, homepage building, chat, user reviews, etc.), these sites also feature custom tools that have contributed greatly to the success of the sites in a largely un-moderated capacity. All users have access to these tools regardless of time spent or experience in the subject matter. These tools include a built-in member status/reputation system, a navigable member contribution history, tracking tools for members usually only available to moderators or server administrators, integrated authoring tools for creating and publishing interactive musical instruction, and a popularity
rating system for all member-contributed lesson material. Members who register avail themselves of these tools to varying degrees to create a knowledge base of educational material on music theory, performance, artists, etc. This behavior fits into common concepts about the advantages of online systems for community organized around specialized resources[2]. Members develop personal ties based on the exchange of music information over distance, and they span a wide range of socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds[3]. This paper seeks to describe in specific terms the tools and techniques used by eTonal to develop a data framework that strongly reinforces community.
reported their age were outside the 15-30 year old age range.
The 2 sites are identical in design except for one important difference- the lesson authoring system in Wholenote is much more complex than the one in ActiveBass, since the developers discovered that most bass technique can be adequately described in a simpler manner than guitar and with simpler authoring tools. The audiences and members of the respective sites are different and distinct and do not overlap. All of the tools except chat are asynchronously operable. The major advantages of asynchronous interactions are that they are not hindered by chronology or distance, and better support smaller, geographically dispersed groups[4].
Public Usage
Site Contributions and Demographics Both sites are highly active and growing. Some relevant usage statistics for the two sites are listed in Tables 1 and 2. ActiveBass has grown comparatively faster. Both sites have no promotion outside an effort to include sit content in major internet search engines. Members Home Pages Lessons Reviews Messages 1 year
21,000
1,300
540
2,700
29,000
2 years
42,250
2,500
1,150
5,000
97,000
Table 1: Wholenote Contributions (as of 9/01/2001) Members Home Pages Lessons Reviews Messages 6 months
4,500
420
260
550
7,500
1.5 yrs
21,000
2,100
1,500
2,700
80,000
Table 2: ActiveBass Contributions (as of 9/01/2001) Member Locations, Age and Gender
The populations of the two sites are very diverse in some respects, and homogenous in others. At Wholenote, as of 9/01/2001, of 37,335 members who declared a geographic location, 72% indicated the United States as their country of residence, with 28% internationally (English is the predominant language with some noticeable use of Spanish and German). Gender information on members is not gathered explicitly but is estimated at 95% male for Wholenote and 92% male for ActiveBass (determined by assessing gender by indications from registered names of the 100 most active users on each site). Age information was submitted by 6,410 Wholenote members entering a contest pool (there was no comparable contest at ActiveBass) and the reported results are shown in table 3. It is interesting to note that over half of the site members who
30.00% 25.00% 20.00% 15.00% 10.00% 5.00% 0.00%
50
Table 3: Age Range of Wholenote Members
It is important to keep in mind that the sites are not only viewed by registered members but by the public at large (we term these unknown web users non-members). They have full access to all parts of the site but may not post any material except in one discussion forum that explicitly allows this. Wholenote currently accumulates approximately 3,100,000 page views per month from 260,390 unique visitors, or 11.9 pages viewed per visitor in a month. ActiveBass on average currently accumulates 1,430,000 page views from 90,430 unique visitors, or 15.8 page views per visitor per month. These monthly unique user statistics dwarf the total registered membership of the sites throughout their history and even more so the active contributors within any month. Pages of musical lesson data published by members account for the vast majority of page views by unknown users (over 90%) and the higher rate of views per visitor at ActiveBass is most likely due to the larger number of smaller, less complicated lessons created there, due to differences in the authoring systems for lessons on each site. (again, ActiveBass’ lesson authoring is much easier, requires less data entry and less technical skill.) DATA COLLECTION
Data collection is at the core of the technical design and infrastructure of the sites. It must be accurate, fast and continuous. The Site Developers created data structures and a database to manage them that could be re-purposed and data displayed within every page quickly and efficiently. We divided all collected data into three conceptual community data types. Community Data Types Primary data
This is voluntarily submitted information by users, and user session data. Examples of voluntarily submitted information include: user demographics provided during member registration or contest entry, member homepages, lessons created by members for public or private consumption, user reviews, and forum messages. Examples of user session data include the time at which a member logs in. Primary data is collected and stored in the site database and comprises the major contributed resource material that non-members (non-contributors) view. Referential data
This consists of either user actions or opinions regarding primary data. Examples include the viewing of a specific site page of contributed content, ratings of lessons
published by other users, book-marking of specific site pages (the site uses its own book-marking system as an inpage tool), threading of member discussion forums (i.e. which particular forum topic and individual comment a user is responding to) and the e-mailing of site pages. Referential data is collected and stored in the site database. This allows the site to know how users are interacting with the site, and can be used to notify contributors of interactions with their material, as well as to dynamically organize new content for users and enhance their navigation. Metrics data
This consists of analyses of primary and referential data. Examples include the status/reputation level of each member (encoded as a single integer number called a "point total"), the level of profanity exhibited by members throughout the site, and the polyphony, texture, and techniques used in a musical lesson example. Metrics data is generally calculated from some combination of the other two data types, and stored in the site database. However, in some cases, this data may be calculated "on-the-fly" and shown to users. One example is the display of threads in the discussion forums, in which the sites compute visual representations to accompany each topic to convey how "hot" or "cold" a topic of discussion is. Collection Techniques
Primary and referential data are generally collected via traditional web-based forms and stored in a database. However, user session data is discretely obtained from the system at the time of user login. The other exception is the collection of musical data where a point-and-click interface allows knowledgeable users to accurately describe how to play a musical example or accompaniment on their respective instruments. This data is encoded in a proprietary format and stored in the site database. Metrics data either is re-computed and stored at the time of collection of other data, or is re-computed on a daily basis using a series of scripts and subsequently stored. USING COMMUNITY DATA FOR INCREASED SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS, PARTICIPATION, AND NAVIGABILITY
Community data is fed back into the site for three distinct purposes: to increase social consciousness, to encourage and reward user participation, and to increase the navigability of the site. Increasing Social Consciousness
An on-line community with a large, active user base of diverse users can often be an administrative nightmare, as the potential for conflict and dissension among its open and changing constituency is vast. To combat this tendency towards combative, nihilistic, or other damaging attitudes towards the site, community data is used to encourage its users to act in accordance with accepted community norms, to make the community environment self-policing, and to correctly identify continually deviant users. This successfully reduces administrative time and costs. Member Identity
Members are asked to give their real first and last name on the site when registering, and are known to others in this
way instead of a pseudonymous or other persistent nickname, and this name is visible even to the general public. This requirement is not circumvented and people use and refer to each other by real name nearly without exception (over 99% of both sites). Of the 42,250 members who are registered and may publish material on the Wholenote site, 88% declared a specific geographical location in addition to their name, and 61% allow a valid email address required in registration to be displayed to other members. Identity in Context
This kind of openness is of course easier to achieve in a context where members are proud of their interests and contributions and happy to let others with similar interests know about and have access to them. Thus the specific context of others’ awareness of their identity combined with the fact that all previous members are generally already providing this level of access creates a high degree of compliance. The absence of a high degree of “role playing” and anonymity within the community is a hugely important factor in creating accountability, real social consciousness, and strong behavioral norms. People who contribute the most material to the site are naturally inclined to present their identity in the best possible manner. This tends to provide an alternative to other types of online interactions that, while they afford graduated levels of personal investment or presence, can be anonymous or very private, and allow for greater degrees of identity concealment or play[5]. User Control of Resources
In addition to their own sense of self, invested members tend to protect, promote, and update their specific contributed resources in the community, look for feedback, and ensure that the experience for their public audience is a rewarding one. This is typical of online information exchange in general as the costs of contributing are quite low, and there is no limit to the number of people who might benefit[6]. It is of note that members who contribute music lessons are equally able to un-publish any lesson and/or completely delete its content material via web-based content management tools provided to all members. If active members were so inclined, working together they could almost entirely remove all content from the site instantaneously. With the tenuous nature of the data being stored on the site, an increased sense of personal responsibility and ownership accrues. Status Metrics
A reputation system for site members was developed based upon their contributions to the community collected in community data. The output is a personalized point total that accompanies a member's name throughout the site, and is instantly increased whenever a member contributes content to the community knowledge base. This system allows other users to quickly determine a member's prominence, and to also assess their own place in the community. It also provides another entry point for navigating into a particular member's contributions to the
Figure 1: Sample Status Point Total and Breakdown
community. A breakdown of a sample total of status points is displayed in Figure 1. Members are aware of a range of active and passive contributions. Members receive points simply for logging on and reading messages, although in much lesser amounts than authoring. In this case the presence of a person in online environments does not need to be comprised entirely of the content of his or her messages, or via communication amongst members. A member can still gain a strong sense of connection to others or to the community as a whole by lurking alone on the site[7]and in fact they are rewarded in status for a steady commitment to this behavior over time (each day that a user is logged on they receive points). There is a palpable status difference between high-point members who achieved their points by posting very frequently in discussion forums, although almost never providing musical education material in those posts, and those members who provide large amounts of instructional material in discussion threads and in lessons. The most active members with the highest points exhibit a combination of both of these behaviors. Self-Policing and Enforcement
Perhaps the largest benefit of feeding status metrics derived from site interactions back to users is that the system greatly aids the community in self-governing. Members can only accumulate large amounts of status points by giving generously to the community which usually also indicates that they wish to act responsibly within it. Consequently, high-status members feel a sense of entitlement to the wellbehaved and courteous environment they have helped to create. All users are aware of these contributions via the point total in any interaction with the contributor on the site or when viewing their published material. In addition a dynamic archive of their entire contribution history and navigation paths to each specific instance are provided. New members or less invested members that have not accumulated points and that cause disruption in the community are either made to feel unwelcome or encouraged to modify their behavior to participate in the spirit in which the community was created. These processes and outcomes occur continually and in very similar fashion to one another in a constant dialogue between invested members and new ones. After these disruptive members examine their place in the community in relation to complaints made against them publicly by high-status members, they either conform to the accepted level of social behavior, or leave the site completely. Profanity Metrics
Each night, a script sweeps the site database looking for profanity in recent user contributions. When profanity is found, the contribution is modified by the script to remove
all but the first letter from the detected word and replace the remainder with dashes. This leaves the context and the tone intact. The incidence of the profanity is logged in the contributing member's account and its location within the data. It is noteworthy that contributions to discussion forums cannot be edited after submission by members or administrators, although they can be deleted. Profanity metrics have proven to be useful for the sites’ administrators in verifying behavior of problem members, and in determining appropriate disciplinary action, such as the issuance of warnings or the suspension of site privileges. Warnings discretely given to offending members are most often met with apology and regret, resulting in acceptable subsequent behavior, or are taken by the member as a sign that they do not belong in the community resulting in a drop or total cessation in contributions. It is interesting to note that as of 9/01/2001 in a period spanning 12 months, at Wholenote only 814 individual word instances of profanity were logged by scripts in 68,030 messages that could have contained them (messages can contain more than one word instance of profanity), and at ActiveBass 1540 instances were detected in 71,457 messages. We surmise that there is substantially more profanity at ActiveBass for the same reason that there are more page views, which is the simplicity of the authoring system. Since it is easier to make lessons and be a contributor, and because lesson authors are the most prevalent users on the message boards, it is likely that a less proficient or technically capable user is to be found publishing on ActiveBass, and there appears to be a corresponding lesser degree of compliance with the site rules or concern for the community. Considering that at least 25% of members at Wholenote and ActiveBass are teenagers this number still seems remarkably small, although its likely that the active message posters often skew older than the general site user in particular at Wholenote due to the onerous degree of technical proficiency required to understand and utilize the lesson generating tools. Banning
No automated system is in place to ban users or auto-notify administrators on the basis of profanity, but users are aware that it is being looked for and is not tolerated. The possibility of banning a member is usually brought to the attention of an administrator by other members, and banning is the most severe result of individual administrative review and qualitative analysis of their postings, and usually is brought on by failing to heed initial warnings about spam, flaming, excessive profanity, and repeated signs of hostility to others. Increasing User Participation
With no resources available to procure paid or licensed content, the eTonal sites are dependent upon its users to make valuable contributions of their musical knowledge to the community. Thus, community data is used to promote user participation by informing contributors that their postings are appreciated, and by increasing their status in the community in proportion to these contributions. Many types of community data are employed to drive users towards these goals.
Content Hit Counters
Each time a piece of user-contributed content is viewed, a hit counter associated with that specific content is incremented. In addition, when members log in, the aggregate totals of page views for all of their contributed content are shown (i.e. totals for all of their lessons, articles, user reviews, forum messages, etc.), as depicted in Figure 2 below. These counters allow content authors to track the popularity of their own content. Most content authors either do not expect to get this type of feedback or are surprised at the popularity of their contributions. Consequently, they become encouraged to contribute more content because they can see that many other users are interested in their viewpoints.
Figure 2: Sample Content Hit Counters
more over time to those new members wishing to become more involved in the workings of the site. Table 4 below examines the retention rate of Wholenote members who signed up in previous months and what the longevity range of members is within the current month’s activity (8/1/2001-9/1/2001). Members with less than a month of membership were excluded. The number shown to the right of the month ranges displayed vertically in the table is the total number of members who registered in that month (and in several months of 1999) and therefore could have logged in and contributed in the most recent month of activity from 8/01/01-9/01/01. The composition section of the table demonstrates that “older” users make up a large portion of the total number of current active members in a month— over 46% of currently active contributors have been on the site 6 months or more, and over 28% joined more than a full year prior to their latest activity. This is key to the sense of community and drives users to continue to participate, since many of their ‘peers’, who joined when they themselves did, continue to be active contributors. Table 4: Start Dates of Members Active in the Month of 8/01
Constant et al found that people provided information and advice to others because they felt that providing answers was a part of their job, not because they have a personal connection to those making inquiries or because they were expecting a direct reciprocation of a collective good[8].
Reputation Metrics
As outlined above, a reputation system for site members was developed based upon their contributions to the community. Whenever a member contributes content, their status in the community grows, and their perception of their importance to a non-member public also grows, which promotes prolonged participation. In addition, low-status members are often encouraged by high-status members to increase their status by contributing. Attrition and Retention
User Participation in a community site over time adds tremendous value to a knowledge collection on line, since there are users who have gained an “institutional memory” of the site and its composition who can help and guide others, influence how they use the site, and correct their behavior when necessary. Older more experienced users tend to react much better towards conflict and the contentious attitudes newcomers may have when they arrive at a site with its own set of behavioral norms. The point total is again a fairly accurate metric of the amount of time invested in the site by users, but the presence of “familiar faces” and known individuals counts for even
5.00% 10.00% 15.00% 20.00% 25.00%
7/01-8/01 1822 6/01-7/01 1540 5/01-6/01 1797 4/01-5/01 1619 3/01-4/01 1896 2/01-3/01 1987
Member Signups By Month
As a technical aside, hit counters are updated at the time when a user requests to view content. Because the update is part of the same stored procedure in the database that retrieves the content, the processing time is negligible. The benefit for site administrators is twofold: first, it is a queryable real-time view into where users spend time on the site, without the use of server log analysis tools, which can be processor-intensive when used to calculate real-time statistics. Secondly, counters allows content on the site to be dynamically organized by its popularity, which again increases ease of navigation for all users towards the “best“ or most popular material.
0.00%
1/01-2/01 2204 12/00-1/01 1943 11/00-12/00 1793 10/00-11/00 1747 9/00-10/00 1609 8/00-9/00 1778 7/00-8/00 1618 6/00-7/00 1461 5/00-6/00 1586 4/00-5/00 2774 3/00-4/00 3455 2/00-3/00 2450 1/00-2/00 1866 7/99-12/99 3205
Retention Rate Composition of 8/01-9/01Activity Increasing Navigability and Comprehension of Contents
It is crucially important that site navigation design properly matches the content and context of the community and larger audiences in order for content provided by members
to be located and appreciated. Because of the volume of information contained on each site, it can often be cumbersome for a user to sift through content using standard directory structures in search of compelling material. For this reason, community data is used to provide different views on the same content to aid navigation. Community data is also used as an effective filter to reduce the amount of navigation required. Searching for Musical Content
This is perhaps the most unique use of community data on the site. The WholeNote website contains over 2000 musical lesson examples in over 1150 published lessons. The lesson directory allows users to filter lessons based upon musical style, skill level, and lesson author. Users of the lesson directory decide on appropriate lessons to view, based upon short descriptions provided by the author. However, the sheer volume of listings can make the search process cumbersome, especially using traditional keyword methods. To address this a set of metrics is computed for each musical lesson example to determine its polyphony (i.e. is it a single-note or chordal part?), its texture (is it rhythmically "busy" or "sparse"?), and the techniques used (such as hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, bends, etc.). Users can then use a custom search engine to find lessons that contain musical examples based upon these characteristics (i.e. "show me a heavy metal lesson that has fast 16-note solos with 'hammer-ons' in it"), as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Musical Metrics Search Engine
Since musical content is not time sensitive it is important not to let previous contributions languish with the wrong navigation system, and allow their authors to feel discouraged about being supplanted. There are great disadvantages to content being organized by authoring time or alphabetically, making it vital to support other ways of navigating to older content that do not favor one author unintentionally over others. The most often used musical metric that solves this problem occurs at authoring time, by making mandatory a pre-determined ‘style’ under which every lesson must be categorized to be listed. This breaks up the amount of lessons into a much more navigable subcategories and enhances searching and faster viewing by an individual who can identify his or her own areas of interest.
Active discussions from the past week in a particular forum often contain over 500 response messages in over 40 different threads (i.e. newly created topics which do not respond to anything previously written). To convey some kind of relative value for each thread while minimizing screen space, a visual representation of the thread's popularity and timeliness is computed on-the-fly and accompanies entry points into the thread itself. As shown in Figure 4, a simple, color-coded, horizontal bar shows the total number of replies in a thread, and how recently these replies were posted. Longer bars denote larger threads, while more colorful (darker) bars denote more recently active threads. Users may then use the listing to navigate to the start of the thread at its initial posting or to the most recent response, which could occur anywhere within the thread. Threads when being read can span multiple web pages an often grow to more than 30-40 responses within their lifetime.
Figure 4: Thread Listing in a Forum
When a user examines an actual thread or topic of discussion, visual metrics of who is responding to what post allows personal discussion to take place within a larger topic without deterring the discussion from remaining focused on the intent of its originator. This also allows other members to see personalized and individual elements to the conversation and allows them to get to know other users, and interact with them in a semi-private context within a larger topic. Responses to the main topic are furthest to the left and linked together by a single vertical line all the way up to the start of the topic. Any responses to other responses are indexed below the initial response and to the right of it, and link up along their own vertical line to the initial response.
Representing Conversation Activity
Another unique use of community data is the manner in which listings of threads in the discussion forums are presented. A quick visual overview of an exchange is a valuable filter for quickly understanding where interesting interactions are taking place[9]. The site discussions are ‘threaded’ meaning an individual can see exactly which specific piece of text inside a topic of discussion is being responded to by any user. This system provides perhaps the highest degree of conversational adjacency, where statements and responses occur next to each other, allowing for greater conversational coherence[10].
Figure 5: Threaded Discussion
In this manner smaller discussions between individuals can occur around the topic without blocking another user’s access or navigability of the original vein of discussion. The visual layout makes divergences from the topic or personal conversations within it very apparent as in figure 5 below. Threaded discussion is essential to provide for in-
depth discussions that can occur over days, without mutating the original topic or limiting discussion to a series of short, shallow responses. Users are also much more tolerant of the widespread practice of off-topic or real-time chatter to friends on-line within a topic since it doesn’t clutter the discussion for others.
Table 6: Wholenote Lesson Ratings by User Category
Tables 7 and 8 show the corresponding use of ratings by the user categories within the community at ActiveBass. Total Users 200,000 / 90.31% (approximate)
1.64%
5053 / 47.7%
Members
20,909 / 9.44%
5.19%
4000 / 37.8%
Authors
554 / 0.25%
39.53%
1535 / 14.5%
User Ratings/Opinions/Popularity of Contributions
The same content hit counters that encourage users to participate in the community can also be used as another axis upon which content can be filtered. Thus, users can easily find the most visited contributions. Tables 5 and 6 demonstrate the degree to which ratings of contributed material at Wholenote are generally positive irrespective of the category of user, general (non-member) user, a member who has not published a lesson, and a member who has him or herself published a lesson (authors may only rate others not themselves). Authors are far more likely to give ratings and in many more specific instances per user than in the other 2 categories. They were also more polarized in terms of the severity of ratings given, being more likely to dispense very positive or very negative ratings than less invested members or non-members, which could point to a higher degree of critical concern for the community in their behavior and using ratings as a quality reinforcement mechanism. Total Users
% Who Rated Total Ratings Given
Non-Members 600,000 / 93.38% (approximate)
0.65%
6741 / 69.1%
Members
42,292 / 6.58%
1.97%
2471 / 25.3%
Authors
243 / 0.04%
32.92%
541 / 5.6%
Percentage of Total Ratings
Table 5: Wholenote Rating System Usage by User Category
90.00% 80.00%
60.00% 50.00% 40.00% 30.00% 20.00% 10.00% 0.00% 1
2
3
4
Non-Members Rating Values Members (1-5, where 1 is Worst) Authors
5
Table 8: ActiveBass Lesson Ratings by User Category
It is apparent that ActiveBass users in every category gave far fewer extremely positive ratings, more negative ones, more nuanced middle-tier ratings, and rated much more frequently, than their counterparts at Wholenote. Impact of Ease of Participation and Content Authoring
Obvious differences between the sites in ratings as in other areas seem attributable to the fact that it is much easier to author lessons at ActiveBass. The “bar” of proficiency being lower means there are more mediocre lesson materials available and in greater numbers. This seems to motivate both the consuming and creating oriented categories of the community there to make more pointed distinctions between good and bad material at the site via ratings. In turn ratings may be more talked about and encouraged as a part of the ActiveBass “culture” versus the norms at Wholenote. It is important to keep in mind that the mechanisms and access to them are entirely identical, although the material within lessons uses a different composition engine exposed only to an author. From the standpoint of a lesson viewer the two sites appear to be close to indistinguishable in their lesson formatting and all aspects of navigation. Book-marking of Site Pages
70.00% 60.00% 50.00% 40.00% 30.00% 20.00% 10.00% 0.00% 1 Non-Members Members Authors
Table 7: ActiveBass Rating System Usage by User Category
Percentage of Total Ratings
Certain categories of content, such as lessons or articles, can be rated by the community, or can be the subject of private message-based feedback to the author using an internal private messaging system. User ratings can be used as a filter to identify premium content in the eyes of the community, providing another filter on existing content. Feedback messages to authors originates in private messages, but can be published to the discussion forums by the lesson author to promote discourse within the community about the particular topic. Such published feedback responses also auto-generate an accompanying link to the original content that sparked the feedback message.
% Who Rated Total Ratings Given
Non-Members
2
3
4
R a t i n g Va l ue s ( 1- 5 , whe r e 1 i s Wo r st )
5
Any site page can be book-marked by a member using the internal book-marking system. These bookmarks are stored in the site database, and displayed in a personalized listing for each member. Members can use these bookmarks to easily navigate to site areas of interest. In addition, metrics data is obtain from the aggregate total of site bookmarks to determine the most book-marked lessons on the site, providing another view into existing lesson content that is desired by users. This is quite distinct from the popularity of a lesson across many users, for it shows what users who are very proficient with the site tools and who have a high degree of re-visits to lessons think of certain lesson material. Consequently the results returned by this
navigation strategy are quite different than those that count hits. User Login Time
As a community driven by user participation and contribution grows in size and popularity, it becomes increasingly harder for its users to determine where new contributions have occurred. Recording the login time of a member allows the site to show them everything that has changed on the site since their last login. When a member logs in, they are taken to their "start page" which gives them a personalized listing of new site activity since their last appearance. Each of these sections is fully navigable and sortable, providing members with a personal microcosm of the site that is based upon content that is "new" to them. A sample listing is shown in Figure 6 below:
environment is a noticeable consequence, although other tools may be used to counteract this effect. These strategies promote social responsibility, encourage greater user participation in the community, create better site navigation, filtering and user awareness. Collecting and utilizing this data facilitates more informed content creation and consumption within a growing contextual knowledge base. Status and reputation metrics give members a sense of their place in the community, while referential data and musical metrics serve as valuable filtering mechanisms, enabling users to find compelling content quickly and to guide others. The use of these concepts allows the eTonal sites to grow the knowledge base of user-generated content faster, while still providing scalable means to navigate this information. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Red Burns and NYU for their early support of Wholenote, to Shelly Farnham and John Davis of the Social Computing Group at MSR and to Jim Burger. REFERENCES
1. Erickson, T. Social Interaction on the Net: Virtual Community as a Participatory Genre. Proceedings of HICCS-30, Maui, HI, January 6-10, 1997. Figure 6: Personalized Listing of New Site Content
The listing of new contributions is a major mechanism by which people who are active on the site choose to navigate, because it shows them how the community is different from the moment of their last viewing of the community. It also gives members the sense that site is constantly altered and dynamic in a way that is much more easily discerned than looking through comprehensive listings for new entries. CONCLUSIONS
Design and development of data collection and feedback methods like those discussed can solve critical challenges in on-line social behavior, content creation, and retention. We have shown techniques with which web sites can collect data from site users and feed that data back to users to create an enhanced and thriving on-line community. Sophisticated integration of this data into the content and structure of a web site can help solve the problems of bad behavior, lack of participation, and difficulty of finding content in a growing collection. We hope to convey that these solutions work best for contextual communities that contribute to a shared resource; that tools must be as specific to the kind of content the community is organized around as possible; that the display and collection of community data must be at the core of the underlying site programming and infrastructure to be effective; and that community interaction is noticeably improved by the implementation of community tools provided to both contributors and a larger audience. We found that when the difficulty of authoring content is too low, quality control problems and a general impoverishment of the social
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