Towards a Design Theory for Online Communities - CiteSeerX

Towards a Design Theory for Online Communities David Gurzick UMBC 1000 Hilltop Circle Baltimore, MD 21250 [email protected] ABSTRACT Online communities are increasingly important in modern social life. Yet, the diverse collection of guidelines that have directed online community design may not be keeping pace with significant changes in the operating environment of these systems. This paper collects and distills the most relevant of these guidelines and describes their instantiation in a design artifact foundational to a larger design science research project. The core contributions include the distilled guidelines, a detailed account of the mechanics of their translation into practice, and a framework for doing design science research in online communities.

Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.3 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Group and Organization Interfaces – Theory and models

General Terms Design, Human Factors, Standardization, Theory

Keywords Online Communities, Design Guidelines, Design Science

1. INTRODUCTION Online communities have emerged as a central component of mainstream online activity [43]. While there has been much debate over the definition of online communities, Preece [73] summarized the relevant positions nicely in her definition: People who interact socially as they strive to satisfy their own needs or perform special roles; a shared purpose that provides a reason for the community; policies that guide people’s interactions; and computer systems to support and mediate social interaction and facilitate a sense of togetherness (p.10) In following this definition, if the goal of an online community is to support and foster social interaction between its users, then the design of the systems that support the community represent the means to this end. This is an inherently sociotechnical problem, as the designer must optimize the social aspects of the community (members and their interactions) through the manipulation of its technical aspects (the engineered components of the system, Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. DESRIST'09, May 7-8, 2009, Malvern, PA, USA. Copyright 2009 ACM 978-1-60558-408-9/09/05...$5.00.

Wayne G. Lutters UMBC 1000 Hilltop Circle Baltimore, MD 21250 [email protected] including the policies and computer systems in use). While simply managing the social or technical aspects alone is difficult, this task increases in complexity when considering the interrelated nature of the two. This is further complicated by an ever shifting operating environment and ever increasing expectations of their value. As with other complex environments, successful designs are not created from scratch, but are rather based on the lessons learned from prior designs [e.g., 91, 92]. This is no different with online communities.

2. DESIGN GUIDELINES This past knowledge is encapsulated in the design theories that inform the selection of strategies by pragmatic guidelines, which are ultimately instantiated in artifacts. These guidelines go by many names, often mentioned as “rules of thumb”, “principles”, “ground rules”, “heuristics”, or “best practice.” By whatever name, they can impact the entire lifecycle of an online community’s design, providing the starting point for the development of a design, adding credence to the selection or adaptation of strategies, and identifying the use of certain metrics in the post-hoc evaluation of a community. Successful design guidelines assist designers in navigating the tradeoffs that always exist in the design space, for instance the choice of using an anonymous screen name versus one that is grounded in the real world identity of a user. Design guidelines exist at the boundary between theory and practice, facilitating the transfer of knowledge between researchers and practitioners that has been developed over the years through efforts to improve the state of online community design. Early research in online communities was largely descriptive [e.g., 5, 15, 42, 76, 86], but over time has become more prescriptive as the desire grew for a more systematic engineering approach. Thus, a growing base of knowledge was developed to direct designers as to the best practices for creating and managing these complex systems. In many cases, these best practices were derived from the post-hoc analysis of prior descriptive studies or borrowed from other relevant disciplines; traditional fields such as social psychology, culture anthropology, and communications, and more recent disciplines such as information systems, humancomputer interaction, computer-mediated communication, and computer-supported collaborative work. At times, the results of these efforts have been expressed explicitly, through detailed lists of design guidelines [45, 73]. In other instances, they have been imparted as more general research findings on the use of online communities [e.g., 6, 33, 61, 68] or the impact had by particular designs [e.g., 8, 14, 25].

A primary contribution of this paper is a novel synthesis of the findings, expressed in eight guidelines developed to summarize the existing literature surrounding online community design. The guidelines included in this framework indicate that an online community should: 1. Establish and articulate a sense of purpose that is fluid to the changing needs of the community 2. Be, at least in part, constructed by its members 3. Promote, facilitate, and temper member interaction 4. Motivate the involvement of members through increased levels of participation 5. Support the construction and management of member identity 6. Incorporate mechanisms that build common ground between members 7. Manage issues of credibility 8. Present a consistent, predictable, and controllable user experience Yet while many of the foundational truths revealed by these early researchers remain valid, changing conditions in the landscape of online communities give reason to challenge the applicability of the design guidelines formed in past environments. In the ensuing years many significant changes have occurred on multiple fronts. In brief these include: An increasing diversity of members now inhabits online communities. Members now more closely resemble the U.S. Population, across all demographics including gender, socioeconomic, educational, and age [43]. This increasing diversity is important to note, as studies conducted on babyboomers and senior citizens have indicated that demographic differences, particularly those related to age, can play a major role in the applicability of certain designs for online communities [34]. Online communities have become hybrid, supporting connections made offline and online. In earlier days, with fewer members online, online communities were largely formed from contacts made in the virtual space (e.g., the WELL). While these connections are still being made, the critical mass of users online has led to a greater increase in connections created offline that have migrated into the online space. As a result we are living more blended lives both physical and digital. Users are leveraging a greater number of community affiliations. Online communities are becoming less monolithic systems. With the addition of new and more specialized communities comes the diffusion of community activity across a web of loosely connected networks. Actions in one network frequently have repercussions in other networks. New modes of interaction are prevalent. Interaction in online communities was once principally (if not exclusively) text-only. Nowadays, fostered by high-bandwidth and increased processing speeds, interaction incorporates more multimedia. This, and the availability of always-on broadband has led to a fundamental shift in the way online communities are used, from users intermittently going online to perform a particular task, to users now maintaining an ongoing pervasive connectivity - made increasingly ubiquitous by more connected and powerful mobile devices. In many ways, online communities, which were once principally an escape from real life, have now become an extension to it.

Given all of the changes to the operating environment of online communities, it may be time to revisit these eight general guidelines and reconsider the fundamentals of online community design theory. Yet while this need to revisit and reconsider design warrants empirical investigation, researching online communities proves to be a complicated affair.

3. STUDYING GUIDELINES THROUGH DESIGN SCIENCE As sociotechnical systems, online communities are a poor match to more traditional empirical techniques that necessitate a highlycontrolled setting. Designers must account for the interrelated nature of the individual social, technical, and environmental elements that together make up an online community. Instead of focusing their attention on the examination of individual features, key resources, or other critical success factors, designers have to see the system as a whole. This wide view is necessary, because social, technical, and environmental conventions often evolve together [70] and as they do, the activities from each area are likely to become intertwined with each other, potentially in obscure and unconventional ways. Separating out a single factor from a sociotechnical system for study or optimization removes it from the whole of the system in which it operates and, as a result, removes the influence of other factors in the system that impact its use. Likewise, attempting to study such systems in rigidly controlled lab settings is an imperfect solution because the operating environment is an essential factor in the makeup of a sociotechnical system. Those systems that are evaluated in isolation from it may fail to account for the totality of the system and their designs are more likely to key in on behaviors that differ from real-life settings. Design science methods are an ideal fit to the complexities inherent to researching online community design. “Designscience research in IT often addresses problems related to some aspect of the design of an information system. Hence, the instantiations produced may be in the form of intellectual or software tools aimed at improving the process of information system development.” [41] Therefore, a set of design guidelines, by nature, is an intellectual tool that can be used to improve the development of an information system. Outside of an actual implementation, the examination of guidelines would be unrealistic and unable to account for the complexities of a system in use. However, when an information system, such as an online community, is designed according to a prescribed set of guidelines, it becomes an artifact that represents the guidelines used to create it. Through assessment of the artifact, the guidelines behind its design can be evaluated, and avenues may be found for their improvement. Central to the design science paradigm is the incorporation of existing knowledge into an artifact that can be researched in a real world setting. Despite the importance of this step, relatively little has been written on the mechanics of instantiating preexisting design guidelines into a new design research artifact [91, 92 as notable exceptions], with less still pertaining to the challenges inherent with creating social software. Therefore, a second contribution of this paper is the description of how to instantiate applicable knowledge from past literature within the context of a particularly complex online community design artifact. This paper is a case study in the translation of guidelines into an artifact of study. As such, it is concerned chiefly with the process of this translation, as the process is not well defined in the literature. Revealing this arc from guidelines to artifact offers

insight into this relatively unexplored process that is central to the design science methodology.

4. FIELDTRIP, AN ONLINE COMMUNITY FOR ADOLESCENTS Fieldtrip is a media-rich online community developed with the goal of stimulating under-engaged teenagers to rethink their ideas about learning and education. Guided by evidence that shows that those adolescents who are emotionally engaged in the learning process [30] or possess a feeling of ownership of their education [36] show higher levels of achievement, the Fieldtrip online community was created as a place where adolescents could go to engage with other adolescents in exploring the factors that they believe impact their education. The discussion was stimulated by videos created by other adolescent filmmakers, who were themselves involved in the conversation, and by the efforts of a group of moderators comprised of undergraduate students from the host institution. These conversations were housed in a central website in three interactive channels, corresponding to affinity for (a) films, (b) filmmakers, or (c) text-only venues. Each channel represented a discussion forum in which resided several threadedmessage boards (see figure 1). This paper references the first iteration of Fieldtrip, created by a multidisciplinary team of researchers (with members from Psychology, History, Economics, Imaging Research, and Information Systems – the latter the host department of the authors) and operated during the Spring of 2007 for a period of just over one month (38 days). Seventy-eight adolescents were enrolled in the community, recruited from the Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. Seven of these adolescents were assigned as filmmakers and received special training and assistance by media professionals to create the videos shared within the community. All participating adolescents were aware that the project was sponsored by both industry and academia. Adolescents, as the driving force behind many of the social and technical changes that have come to online communities in recent years are poised as a ongoing drivers of innovation in this area. By investigating the design of online communities for a population that is, in many ways, divergent from those populations that underpin the current understanding of design, can

lead to new and novel ways of approaching the design of online communities in general. Such conceptual understanding is likely to have far reaching results, leading to the creation of more sustainable and effective online communities. Aside from its use of avant-garde demographic, Fieldtrip is well suited for conducting research into the design of online communities. When speaking on the selection of artifacts for design science research, Konstan and Chen [48] remarked that when embedding a study into an online community, realism is essential and that it is often valuable to create the artifact so that its users see it as serving a purpose other than the research. For Fieldtrip, the main function of the online community was as a location for adolescents to talk about their education and learning, permitting a real-environment in which research on the medium (the design of the community) is overshadowed by the message in the eyes of the participants. Fieldtrip was also a heavily instrumented online community, with the ability to capture the activity of its members for later analysis. This data was complemented by design-oriented questions included in the preand post- surveys given to community members. Lastly, as will be evidenced in the following sections, Fieldtrip was, as much as possible, created in accordance with existing best practice, thereby providing an ideal platform for initiating the study of online community design.

5. EIGHT GUIDELINES FOR ONLINE COMMUNITY DESIGN 1. Guideline 1: An online community should establish and articulate a sense of purpose that is fluid to the changing needs of the community In an online community, the sense of purpose is an expression of how members are connected and the general goal of their interaction. It is important both to orient and entice newcomers to the community as well as to provide a common frame of reference for more seasoned members. To succeed at these functions, several best practices are suggested to online community

designers as they go about establishing, articulating, and evolving the community’s purpose. Though at first, the purpose is developed by the community founders to express why the community was created, its initial role is to offer newcomers an idea of the resources that are likely to be found within the community [37] so that they can make an informed decision as to whether they should join. According to Preece, providing newcomers with a clear sense of the purpose of the community helps to deter those for whom the community might not be an ideal match [73]. The purpose might also be used to differentiate an online community from its competitors. As online communities are not an endangered resource, a newcomer needs to know why they should join one online community over others of the same genre or domain. While important to newcomers, the purpose is also a valuable resource for current members. Given that the members of an online community often represent a diverse set of attitudes, behaviors, and agendas, the purpose can serve to offer a consistent direction, providing a common frame of reference that illustrates the primary reason that the community exists. This common frame of reference is especially important during periods of dispute, disorder, or conflict as a method to return focus to the principle goals of the community [90]. This is not to suggest however, that the purpose be so narrowly defined as to curtail all interactions not immediately or obviously “on topic”, as such interactions have been shown to enhance member participation [96] and are necessary to help evolve the purpose so that it remains relevant to the direction of the community [45, 65]. It is the role of the designer is to establish, articulate, and evolve the community’s purpose so that it can orient and entice newcomers and establish a frame of reference for existing members. This is ideally a task that is conducted during the early stages of design so that the organizers of the community can ascertain the full scope of resources likely to be necessary to meet member’s needs [37]. However, it is known that many online communities are not pre-planned but rather form organically [45] and it may be contended that their formation is likely the result of developing a sense of purpose. In either case, best practice recommends that when establishing the purpose of the community, the designer should go beyond just describing how members are connected to define what is the particular intent of the group [2]. For instance, the purpose of an online community created for health providers in the local community (representing how the members are connected) might be to share insights into the application of new and emerging medical technologies (the intent of the group). Once the designer has established what the purpose of the community should be, the next task is to articulate this to the community. Though many practices exist that emphasize the importance of a comprehensive or elaborate statement of purpose, especially in corporate-sponsored online communities where it is often referred to as a mission statement and is a component of a larger branding strategy [see 45, 64], it is unnecessary for the statement of purpose to be overly complex. A simple statement may be sufficient at the onset of the community and left to be clarified as the community develops [79]. It is also less important for the purpose to be well written than for it to be known and accepted. For this reason, designers should ensure that purpose is articulated frequently, in areas where both old and new members can see it. To support this effort, a common practice among designers is to incorporate the statement of purpose (or suitable variant) into the visual layout of the community, thus ensuring its

continued and pervasive presence. Likewise, in the registration/ enrollment of new members, the governance of the community, and other areas of sociability, additional opportunities are presented to reiterate and reinforce the purpose of the community [45, 73, 90]. While it is important for designers to ensure a clear articulation of the community’s purpose throughout the lifespan of the community, this does not mean that the purpose should be inflexible once it has been initially established. Indeed, online communities are not static structures, and their membership and purpose may change over time. This point is made by Kim who notes that successful communities evolve in step with the changing goals of members and owners [45]. Take for example the creation of californiawildfires.org, an online community that emerged in the aftermath of the California wildfires of 2007. The community was initially set up to connect individuals displaced by the fire with members who had open rooms available. However, after the fires subsided and placement service was no longer needed, the community continued on. Members had come to rely on the community as an information hub and as a means for continuing relationships established through the shared experience of the wildfires. The members literally demanded that it persist to fulfill this emergent role. Designers should take note of such changes and ensure the purpose, in all its articulations, is modified accordingly. In support of this effort, Kim (2000) suggested that feedback loops be incorporated into a community’s design. She offered that these might range from the basic, such as the placement of an email link, to the more sophisticated, such as member/owner forums on the topic of community purpose.

5.1.1 How Fieldtrip established and articulated a sense of purpose

The purpose of the Fieldtrip online community, of stimulating adolescents to discuss and reflect upon their education-related beliefs and attitudes towards school, was established from the general research goals of the Fieldtrip project and the larger research agendas of the members of the project team. As this purpose was established prior to the creation of the community, numerous opportunities were made available to integrate it into the community’s design and the mechanisms by which the community was initially marketed to its potential adolescent members. During the recruitment of members, the purpose was articulated at each point of contact. For example, in the description of the Fieldtrip group that was created on the social networking website Facebook, the purpose was described as a message to adolescents that said, Hey teens, So, what do you think about SCHOOL? Do you struggle to care about schoolwork? Why is becoming educated not as popular in the U.S. as in other places? Is school a bad match for our culture? Is it too disconnected from reality? Too boring? Not worth it? We’re not sure anybody’s asked you, SO WE WILL. For one month, starting May 15th, the Fieldtrip website will stream videos made by older teenagers collaborating with professional filmmakers. They’re exploring questions that we hope will get you talking. You’ll see new kinds of films that deal with issues any breathing teenager is probably interested in.

You’ll be part of important research that can make a real difference...AND, you’ll get $20 worth of iTunes. Similar messages were included in the emails, flyers, and website setup to aid recruitment. In addition to its articulation during recruitment, the purpose was also communicated to those who had become members and were now in the online community website. This was accomplished in two ways. First, the purpose was made clear to the undergraduate moderators during the training sessions they attended prior to, and during the operation of the online community. In these sessions, the moderators were asked to keep the purpose in mind during their interactions with the adolescent members of the community. Secondly, a special section, entitled “About this project” was added to the website and made available from all pages in the website. In this section, the purpose was reiterated as, The Fieldtrip project works entirely outside of schools (that's why we call it Fieldtrip) to start conversations about some of the major reasons young people in the U.S. don't always value school a whole lot. In other countries, kids do. All the money and effort that goes into trying to "fix" education by improving schools and teachers won’t help much if young people don’t care about school anyway. Why do you think people start to lose interest in education? Best practice recommends that the community include features that allow the purpose of the community to evolve. While the small duration of the first iteration likely limited the extent to which the purpose might evolve, efforts were made to incorporate a feedback loop into the community for members to share their opinions and suggestions. This loop was located in the discussion forum of the text-only channel, where community members were allowed to start their own threaded message-boards.

2. Guideline 2: An online community should be, at least in part, constructed by its members An online community is more than the sum of its technical components. It is a system that is composed of users who interact with each other to fulfill their needs. Though initially, an online community is designed and created by its originators (though even at this point, guiding direction is often sought from its future members), the community eventually comes to represent those individuals who inhabit it. To support this movement, the membership should be brought into the construction of the community. Such action not only helps to sustain and grow the community but also serves to enable a meaningful connection with its members. For an online community to remain viable in light of a dynamic environment and changing user needs, the community must continually expand and evolve. Allowing members to take an active part in the formation of its design can help provide the breadth, depth, and complexity [45] needed to sustain and grow a community and address the varied needs of its membership. Such efforts are particularly important for managing a large community, as this strategy allows members to naturally congregate into subgroups around particular interests. It is known that in (offline) community groups, meaningful interaction more frequently occurs in smaller groups [22, 39]. It is only natural to assume that this would persist in the online space. It is also expected that members of a community will try to adapt the system to suit their own purpose. Giving legitimate channels for this to occur both limits the amount of abandonment and promotes continual adaptation in a consistent and controlled fashion. Further,

allowing members of an online community to take an active part in its formation increases the number of people that are able to maintain the community. This is another form of interaction that members can have and one that might hold more lasting appeal. Lastly, those members that actively help construct the community are more apt to recruit members for it [73] and serve in other supportive capacities. Looking beyond these initial reasons to support processes of change and growth, a host of other benefits come from allowing member participation in the construction of the community. The act of creating the community creates an affinity for the community by its members. This mirrors the logic that educators have long known, that if an individual can be coaxed into making an intentional contribution, the result is an increased likelihood that one will continue the activity and perhaps deepen one’s involvement in it [12]. The ways in which a designer can allow members to construct the community can occur in a variety of ways, ranging from those where the construction is strictly limited by the community’s design, to those where nearly all aspects of the design can be modified. For the former variety, perhaps most common are the designs that allow the membership to expand the available areas where social interaction typically occurs. This can be seen in online communities with message boards that allow members to create new threads of discussion, communities with chat functionality that enable members to create new “rooms” for specific chats, or artifact-based communities where members are allowed to introduce new artifacts into the system, as with the adding of articles in Wikipedia [13] or films in MovieLens [21]. In contrast to community designs that are tightly controlled, at the other extreme are constructivist designs that empower the membership to create the actual online environment themselves (in a more free-form, dynamic manner). This latter strategy was first popularized in the early 90’s in research in MUDs and MOOs. These primitive virtual worlds were predominantly textbased environments and provided their virtual residents with a quasi-geospatial environment in which interactions could occur. Bruckman and Resnick, members of MIT’s media laboratory began studying these online communities to see what would happen when community members were enabled with tools to create these environments themselves. Their early work was centered in the MediaMoo online community – a virtual environment architected to resemble the MIT media laboratory [11]. Insight from this project highlighted how constructivist member experiences, incorporated into the design of the online community, could produce the beneficial effect of increasing the amount and duration of involvement by its members. On a theoretical level, the act of creating the community appeared to establish a form of shared identity that tied individuals to the community they had helped to create – an act begetting more frequent and longer participation, and an outcome resulting in members showing greater responsibility to sustain community operations [9, 10].

5.2.1 How Fieldtrip helped members to construct the online community

The design of Fieldtrip supported a controlled set of ways that gave members the opportunity to help construct the online community. These included allowing members to create new message boards and post new messages to existing message boards, using the content of these posts to help direct the films created by the filmmakers, and having the home page display snippets of the posts made by members.

The adolescent members of the community were able to create new message boards in the text-only discussion channel. While this area represented the only location where community members could create new message boards, they could add new posts to all existing message boards in the main online community. The adding of new posts permitted community members to introduce new questions and raise new directions of conversation for the community at-large to pursue. Of the other members of the community, the filmmakers in particular were prompted to read the posts left in response to their films and to incorporate relevant issues, topics, and ideas into the films they were creating (as much of the film production was scheduled to occur during the time the community was “live”). Likewise, verbiage on the website and in communications sent to the adolescent community member emphasized that the filmmakers and community members were working together to develop the films (the community members giving ideas and viewpoints, the filmmakers using these and their own to direct the production of the films). This was designed to evoke a sense of co-construction of the community’s design, as the films were a principle element of its design. While the subject matter of the member posts was used to direct the development of the films, the actual text of these posts was used to construct the visual design of the community website. Specifically, the homepage of the online community was constantly updated as a result of new posts and films being added by the members of the community. The updated areas were designed to coincide with the three channels in the community, showing the text of two recent posts in each area (and the related images for posts made to message boards in the films and filmmakers channels).

3. Guideline 3: An online community should promote, facilitate, and temper member interaction The essence of an online community is social interaction, as it enables the needs of its members to be met and the purpose of the community to be advanced. It is therefore crucial to ensure that the interaction in the community occurs in the amount necessary to sustain the community, that its overall direction is on topic to the community’s purpose and the interests of its maintainers, and that it occurs in a civil and non-disruptive manner. A significant amount of theory suggests how best to achieve these goals, which together are often referred to under the umbrella term of moderation. While best practices for designers can take the form of both technical and social designs, it is in the latter area where most exist. Enacting these social designs are moderators, who themselves are key members of the online community. Early studies in the domain of online community research found that one of the most important tasks for online moderators was to promote discussion among the members of the community [7, 18]. Moderation strategies, when employed effectively, were found to be successful at increasing the amount of visible discussion (as might appear in a post to a message board or an email to a listserv). The use of moderation was seen both as a way of promoting ongoing participation by those active in the community and also as a way to entice newcomers and the less communicative to post. These findings have an increased importance to modern online community designers, who are tasked with promoting a level of interaction necessary to maintain vibrant and sustainable communities despite an increasing number of alternate online channels competing for members and attention.

Promoting interaction is often a balancing act. With a minimized number of members comes the difficulty of generating enough discussion from each member to ensure sustainability, while an overabundance of members can lead a community to feel impersonal or overwhelming [73]. The larger the community, the more burden that is placed on its moderators [45] because, as sociological theory suggests, the less individual members will feel the need to make contributions [38]. As important as it is to promote interaction in an online community, it is equally important to facilitate the generated interaction to ensure that it is in line with the purpose of the community and its established norms. The purpose is the common reason that members are in the community and should thusly be the primary focus of its interaction. General studies on community longevity indicate that those communities that are unable to maintain a consistent focus are among the least likely to persist long term [16, 80]. This is supported by evidence that suggests that moderated online communities are more appealing to users than those with no formal moderation [96]. However, it is likely that this appeal towards moderated communities comes not only as a result of interaction that is kept on topic but is also because moderated interaction is more apt to conform to the norms of interaction that exist in the community. As summarized by Kim [45], “When a group of people coalesce into a community, they develop a unique set of community standards that reflect their needs, interests, and values”. (p. 208) Interaction occurring outside of the accepted norms is also less likely to be beneficial to the interacting member or to the community. Here again, moderators play an important role in reinforcing these norms. By explaining to members the operation of community features and communicating the norms underlying when and how to use them, moderators help introduce newcomers to the more tacit aspects of the community [73]. As research has shown that that a user’s ongoing participation is positively affected by receiving indication that they are on topic and conforming to community norms [51], moderators should also offer supportive feedback when members (particularly newcomers) appropriately take part in community interactions. Additionally, because moderators normally have expertise in the community’s operation (as obtained from continued experience), it is expected that they can direct members to existing resources, appropriate discussions and, in cases, might be empowered to arrange the environment to suit the needs of the conversation. The moderators in the Pueblo online community exemplified this latter role [70]. To support rapid changes in the community so as to best facilitate interaction and interaction between secondaryschool children, a special class of moderators termed “wizards” was created and given the ability to manually override any community setting. This ability, which came to be referred to as “whizzing”, enabled the moderators to interact directly with members, create and modify member accounts, and change the attributes of resources in the community. In this manner the role of the moderator is very much like Vygotsky's [89] "more informed other", helping newcomers to the community learn the norms of its interaction and ensuring opportunities for purposeful involvement. Even in mediated communities there is the potential for disruptive interaction that negatively influences the community. For some, having a shield of anonymity gives way to behavior that might not otherwise occur in a more identifiable setting [53]. For others, interactions in an online setting, lacking the familiar nonverbal cues of face-to-face communication, yields misunderstandings

and misinterpretations, giving way to disruptive behavior [95]. Again, best practice points towards the use of moderators as the preferred method for tempering such community interaction. As the typical interaction is open-ended in nature, it is up to the moderator to interpret the context of messages and determine the appropriate response to those deemed disorderly. For this, best practice recommends the incorporation of technical mechanisms into the community design to assist moderators in rendering their response, including tools to monitor activity, silence or ban repeatedly disruptive members, remove/edit posted messages, and to allow the moderator to interact directly with disruptive members outside of the general community forums [35]. A final suggestion is to support moderation that is learned through observation and experience. Moderation is commonly learned ‘on the job’, with new moderators mirroring the actions of their more experienced counterparts and receiving feedback on their own trial-and-error approaches [73]. As a way to support this apprenticeship activity of moderators, it is recommended that the designer creates a separate space away from where the community members interact, where moderators can discuss their role with other moderators [45, 73]. In this backchannel to the primary community interaction, moderators can share their experiences on what has proved successful and discuss strategies for handling relevant issues in the community.

5.3.1 How Fieldtrip promoted, facilitated, and tempered member interaction

The primary means for promoting, facilitating, and tempering interaction in the Fieldtrip online community was through the use of trained moderators. A total of seventeen moderators were recruited from the undergraduate students of the Psychology Department of the host institution. A head moderator was responsible for coordinating the scheduling of shifts to ensure coverage of the community during each hour of its operation and did not participate directly. Each moderator participated in two training sessions that covered general strategies of how to promote member interaction (with instructions on how to ask questions in the discussion forums to provide openings for members to contribute and strategies to get the less communicative members to post), facilitate the ongoing discussions (by maintaining topical focus), and temper the interaction should it get out of hand (including escalation procedures for emergency situations and procedures for handling reports of abuse and suicide indication). During these training sessions, the moderators were also given the chance to explore the online community and become acquainted with its operation. Beyond just posting in the forums, the moderators were given the ability to interact with community members through email. Each moderator was provided with a Fieldtrip-specific email address (@Fieldtripfilms.com) and access to the email addresses of the community members. This email system was created to allow the moderators an additional means to interact with the adolescents to prompt them to contribute or, if necessary, to address negative behavior in the community. Each moderator was assigned management responsibilities over a subset of community members (roughly four or five per moderator) with the directions to email these members midway though the project if they had not yet posted in the discussion forums. To assist the moderators to appear more personable and approachable, they created short profiles about themselves, which were posted on the “About this project” page and accessible from all pages. Further, like the adolescent community members, the moderators chose multi-word screen names from a preset list of words. The letters

“MOD” prefixed these screen names, for the purpose of differentiating their message posts from those made by other members of the community. In addition to having access to all of the features of the online community that the adolescent members had, the moderators were also able to utilize additional features available only from a restricted administrative site. In this website, moderators were able to edit or delete inappropriate posts, receive additional information for contacting the community members individually through email, track the activity of individual members, access a suicide prevention guide, and view some general statistics on site usage. The administrative site also provided a discussion forum available to the moderators that they could use to talk about moderating, share strategies, and handle the coordination activities not applicable to the main online community. As heard in this forum: I see the edgy comments that the previous moderator was talking about...#460 =( i believe was a ranting message in the race discussion. I'm not sure if it crosses a line either...but that might be because I don't really think its a coherent thought. I didn't understand what they were saying a lot of the time. Maybe if someone else does..and it is offensive...they can edit it appropriate. (ModLiveLaughLove) Really, um, nothing much. Only user on was Anna, very briefly. I watched the two new videos, and I responded to an older video of Sonya's entitled "45K" because I wanted to leave the newer videos for students to comment on, and bring up older videos to see if we can get some fresh opinions (especially now that we have a lot more users lurking around than when we started). I think that's going to be my strategy from now on - every shift I'll pick an old thread to bump back up to the top. (ModMadPicklePrincess) I wanted to know if someone could do my 8-10AM shift on Sunday June 3, 2007. I would like to make up that shift on Saturday June 2, or Friday June 1 after 10pm....If someone is willing to do me this favor than please let me know. (ModBeautifulNight) Given the importance of moderation to an online community and given that few moderation studies have investigated the effect of different moderation styles or how to moderate adolescents, it was unknown what style of moderation would be most effective for Fieldtrip. For this reason it was expected that the specifics of how the community was moderated would evolve during the course of the first iteration of the community. Over time, three styles of moderation were enacted in response to the evolving conditions witnessed in the community. At the onset of the community, the moderators were encouraged to be proactive at starting new threads of conversation and to adopt an open, inquisitive tone with the adolescent community members (this was characterized by asking open-ended questions and by responding to posts with requests for elaboration or reflection). This resulted in the over involvement of the moderators in the first week, as the number of posts by the moderators equaled (and on some days, outnumbered) the number of posts by the adolescent community members. As a result, the moderators were encouraged to adopt a less intensive style, where they were asked to limit their posting only to those message boards that had been inactive for a few days or to messages directed at the moderators. While this style was taken up by most of the moderators, a few still maintained a higher level of posting than would have been desired during this time. This condition was attributed to their having not received

the adjustment request from the head moderator (though overall, the total number of posts made by moderators decreased substantially during this time period). This style of moderation continued until right before the final days of the community. As the number of posts had been in decline in the prior week, the decision was made to experiment with the moderation style to attempt to elicit a larger (and more varied) response. In this final evolution, the moderators were told that they could return to a more proactive style, although this time they were told that they could also use provocative and controversial posts to help stimulate discussion. Following this change, the number of posts again increased.1 Clearly, the moderation style had an impact on the social interaction in the community, however because the moderation style was not carefully controlled it was difficult to determine the extent of the impact. Aside from the use of moderators, the use of video prompts, and the configuration of a special section of the homepage to highlight certain message boards were included in the community design to help promote interaction in the community. The first of these mechanisms, the use of video prompts, refers to the instigating questions that were embedded into many of the films as a way to initiate an initial line of discussion. For instance, the filmmaker Anna anchored her first video, “Desert Island”, with the question, “So would you choose to have a manual or a teacher? Would you rather be self-taught or have somebody teach you?” The second mechanism incorporated to promote interaction was the configuration of a portion of the home page to highlight important areas of conversation. Like moderation, this element of the design also underwent modification to try and increase its ability to promote interaction. Initially this portion of the home page was labeled “Hot Topic” and was used to draw attention to the particular piece of media or content that was the most popular at the time the home page was visited. This was created with the intention of funneling attention towards the content that was stimulating the most discussion. As different message boards were added, it was anticipated that this area would change to reflect the new “hot” area of congregation in the community. However, this design did not function as expected. The initial rush of posts that came with the launch of the community caused the message board for one film to receive a mass of posts that later message boards could not surmount. When the hot topic did not change over the course of the first week, this design element was modified to display the message board with the next highest number of posts that had not already been displayed. Over the course of the next eight days, the message board was changed every other day to ensure variety in the “Hot Topic” After these last eight days, the design of this area underwent a more substantial evolution to return to showcase content that might prompt discussion. In this final evolution, it was decided that the presentation of a new unwatched film might cause its adolescent watcher to want to discuss it. To accomplish this, the

1

An initial review of the adolescent community member posts made during this timeframe suggests that moderator posts made under this style received a higher emotive response from the adolescents.

hot topic was relabeled as “Check this out”. This new section searched the historical archives of the films that the adolescent had viewed, and selected a random film to display from the films that he or she had not yet seen. Once all the films had been watched, the film selection was made at random from the set of all films. There were no clear patterns that immediately emerged to determine whether any of these methods would be best at generating discussion,2 suggesting the potential for other, more effective methods.

4. Guideline 4: An online community should motivate the involvement of members through increased levels of participation Arguably the most critical aspect of an online community is the involvement of its members, as it is through the collective involvement of members that the community experience is shaped and defined. Barki and Hartwick [4] described user involvement as ,“a subjective psychological state reflecting the importance and personal relevance that a user attaches to a given system.” [4] This psychological definition was in contrast to the more actionoriented definition they gave to user participation, being the assignments, activities, and behaviors performed by users. In studying the relationship between these two concepts, Barki and Hartwick found that increased user participation promoted the subjective sense of user involvement. The seemingly straightforward relationship between increased participation and increased involvement permeates much of the literature for designing online communities. But participation in an online community is not a single function performed in one particular way, which either occurs or does not. Rather participation can take on many varied forms, limited only by the affordances of the technical tools and social structures existing within the community. As well, the ways that a user might participate are likely to change over time with both the lifecycle of the online community and the lifecycle of its members. For instance, the participation that might lead to the increased involvement of a newcomer to a community is not likely to be the same participation that might lead to increased involvement by a more veteran member. It is because the lifecycle of an online community influences, and is impacted by, the lifecycles of its members that it is important to also consider how an individual member’s involvement in the community might change over time. Understanding how an individual’s involvement might change, and the likely motivations for such changes, can direct a designer’s use of best practices to most adequately provide support for participation that is worthwhile to both the community and the user. A starting point for increasing involvement is to assist members in the move from lurking towards more active, visible participation. Lurkers are those users who are participants in an online community but who do not engage in the main public interactions [67]. There are many reasons why lurkers lurk [68]. For some it is reluctance for direct contribution or a desire to remain

2 The

“Hot Topic” was used until 17 days into the pilot, at which time the “Check it out” feature was implemented. The hot topic received 46 clicks from 304 views (15%), whereas the check it out feature received 23 clicks from 211 views (11%). An equal number of the adolescents that visited a message board through these links posted to that message board.

anonymous. Others find their needs for information or community are met in their passive role as onlookers [69]. Despite their lack of direct involvement, members that lurk often still feel very much a part of a community and still frequently report benefit from their involvement. Moreover, the activity of lurking is easily misclassified. Aside from the reality that nearly all users lurk from time-to-time [68], when considering those users who have yet to communicate in a shared dialogue of an online community, other reasons may explain this behavior. Lave and Wenger [54] have indicated that it is through peripheral activity (such as lurking), that a newcomer becomes familiar with the tactic norms and procedures of a community. It is only after this process of familiarization that they can move on to partake in forms more closely related to the shared purpose of the community. From this perspective, lurking might be better viewed as a starting point for more active participation. Individuals may exist at the fringe of the community for a very long time before engaging in a more focal activity. This may be because they have to first learn the rites and standard practices of the community, which are potential barriers to entry. Some of these barriers are formal, such as requiring an individual to register with the community to receive services, while other barriers are more informal, like having to learn how to use a commenting system and the norms for making a comment. Such behavior has been witnessed in online communities like Wikipedia [13] where after engaging at the periphery for a period of time by participating in correcting typos and making minor page edits on familiar topics, users eventually moved to participation deemed more central to the community, such as becoming caretakers to the site and overseeing large collections of articles. This change occurred as members became more expert in the craft (such as learning the markup style particular to Wikipedia) and received constructive feedback from other, more longstanding, members. Enticing participation through the use of extrinsic motivators of recognition and status is a second practice recommended for increasing involvement. According to social theory, extrinsic motivators are often highly successful at promoting a desired course of behavior [85]. The acknowledgement of a contribution, achievement of a particular goal, the attaining of a status, or other noteworthy outcome of participation can serve as a powerful incentive towards increased participation. A prime example of incorporating an extrinsic motivator into a design is seen in the online community Experts Exchange (www.expertsexchange.net). Members of this community are given an allotment of credits each month (they can buy more if they would like), which they use to entice other members to answer technology-related questions. A member would post a question along with a number of points that he or she believed its answer to be worth. Other members then attempt to answer the question until the member that posted the question believes it has been answered, at which time the points are transferred to the answering member’s account. Though the points are not redeemable for money, there is a pride that is expressed by the members of the community who have accrued large point totals. Though Experts Exchange has many competitors, it has continued to retain a large and active membership. No doubt the creative point strategy, and the motivation it provides for members to participate, has played a role in this. A final practice for increasing the level of participation in an online community is to develop a variety of roles, and support members in taking on and performing them. On this point, Kim remarked how users, filling a variety of social roles, bind a community together. To assist online community designers in

leveraging this wisdom, Kim [45] offered a conceptualization of basic community roles and their order of progression that she called the membership life cycle. In this model, a community member can progress through a succession of five roles from visitor to elder, with each new role highlighted by different expectations of participation. For further benefit to the community, this practice of supporting roles and role progression can be aligned with the development of leaders that are associated with, and accepted by, the community. One of the benefits that come with leaders who have an awareness and interest in the community is the ability for them to take over certain responsibilities that are necessary for community operation. Communities that are managed by some elite few have a noticeable point of failure, in that these individuals, if they do not perform their tasks, can lead to the stagnation of a community [21]. Allowing members to participate in the task of community operation, such as the vetting of submitted content [52] or the welcoming of new members [74] makes the community more resilient to the loss of individual members who have become either unable or unwilling to perform critical activities. Lastly, as a community increases in size, its needs for maintenance increase. The practice of incorporating members into its maintenance provides a mechanism for dealing with this increasing scale and for sustaining community growth.

5.4.1 How Fieldtrip motivated the involvement of members with increasing levels of participation

Fieldtrip was designed to take advantage of a number of best practices centered on increasing the level of participation of its adolescent members for the purpose of motivating their involvement in the online community. Specifically, the design involved the use of techniques intended to encourage the less active members to be more participative, the use of extrinsic motivators to validate meaningful participation, and the incorporation of a variety of distinct roles into the community. The first of these practices can be found in how email messages were employed to move adolescent members past barriers that prevented more active involvement (i.e. posting). Fieldtrip represented a nascent online community where all members were essentially newcomers who joined the community within a short period of time (a condition which was made known to the adolescent members during recruitment, registration, and in the online community itself). As was expected, this short period did not provide an opportunity for the adolescents to adopt any nonstandard community-specific jargon or behaviors. Because of this, and the general simplicity of the website (in which posting to a message board was the only means for interacting), the main barriers to involvement were considered to be less related to knowing any specific norms or procedures and more related to the technical hurdles of using the system or with the adolescents being too shy or not knowing what to post. To tackle the technical barrier, Fieldtrip staff, with assistance from the moderators, sent email to the adolescents who had completed registration (and had been invited to participate in the online community), but who had not completed enrollment, to inquire whether there were any difficulties that the adolescents needed help in resolving. The moderators were again used to help address the condition of adolescents who were too shy or unsure of what to post. In this case, the moderators were asked to email those adolescents who had yet to post after the first week the community was live and, in doing so, help familiarize these members with the community operations by providing suggestions about what and where they might post.

Though no measures were directly taken to determine the exact effectiveness of these emails, the moderators reported (in the field notes that each was required to make at the end of his or her shift) incidents where the contacted adolescents either completed enrollment or began posting. Just as messages sent via email were used to help motivate involvement by stimulating the non-participatory to participate, messages posted to the discussion forums of the community were used as extrinsic motivators to reinforce desired forms of participation. The moderators, who were told to offer validation to thoughtful, on-topic posts made by the adolescents, carried out this second best practice. This often occurred in the introductory lines of the moderator response, as in “I definitely understand what you are saying …” (ModLiveLaughLove), “That is a good point ...” (ModNightCat), “Funny that you would post this because I thought about posting it. : ) …” (ModGreenApple). The final best practice applied to the Fieldtrip design for motivating involvement through increased levels of participation followed the advice of Kim [45] to create a set of distinct roles and to provide the means for these roles to be filled by aspiring members. Therefore, in Fieldtrip, a distinction was made between four specific roles, being: (a) community member (nonfilmmaker), (b) filmmaker, (c) moderator, and (d) researcher. The distinction between roles was made to have a plausible scenario for role progression – from community member to filmmaker to moderator to researcher/staff – by tying these roles to real life movements. The filmmakers, though adolescents, were all upperclassman, and many of their films discussed life after high school. The moderators represented a common next step beyond high school, being undergraduates in college. Often, the moderators would refer back to high school experiences, connecting those two roles. Several of the moderators, in their posted profiles on the Fieldtrip website, described long-term plans of becoming researchers, completing the role progression. In fact, no mechanisms were established to allow movement between these roles. This was because Kim’s model was created with the assumption that role progression would occur over a longer term than the first iteration of Fieldtrip permitted. Still, the notion of the potential for movement between roles was present in the community. As a case in point, many of the community members inquired about becoming filmmakers and a few moderators asked about how they might become a researcher.

5. Guideline 5: An online community should support the construction and management of member identity Social interaction is a complex affair. Goffman [32] gives meaning to the processes involved in a typical interaction through the use of a dramaturgical perspective. Individuals participating in an interaction are synonymous with actors in a play, each concerned with the presentational needs of their role as performed for the benefit of a larger audience. This portrayal is shaped by the actor’s interactions with other actors, the situational affordances of the stage on which the performance is given, and the cultural expectations of the audience. By taking care to accentuate certain information that is perceived to strengthen their performance and concealing information thought to be contradictory the actor develops an identity for the role he or she is playing (an act Goffman refers to as mystification. See [32] for further detail). This identity is then strengthened by ongoing interactions and observed behaviors deemed consistent with the assumed role.

In the virtual stage that is an online community, identity plays a starring role. The dramaturgical perspective of social interaction represents a vehicle for describing the best design practices (and their theoretical underpinnings) related to supporting the construction and management of identity in an online community. In most cases there is little distinction between the practices that support the initial construction of one’s identity and the practices that support its ongoing maintenance (as an identity is continually formed and refined through exposure to new ideas, new people and different environmental conditions), therefore these two concepts are described together in the following discussion. Indeed, exploring the connection between community design and identity-related goals is not foreign to online community researchers. In an examination of a large number of online communities, Ma [60] recognized four distinctive categories that relate to identity-related design practices: Virtual co-presence: Just as an actor lacking an audience (or stage crew) would likely find little incentive to perform his or her role, so to would a user, finding an empty online community, have little motivation for interacting within it. Predicated on the belief that identity is constructed through the projection of one’s self to others [63], the absence of opportunities for social interaction run counter to a users’ presentational needs. Therefore, design practices should facilitate a sense of togetherness between members or otherwise give an impression that an online community is a populated space. Of these practices Ma [60] gave the examples of synchronous chat programs and other features that explicitly show who is currently online or what a given user is doing (e.g., typing a response or reading a message). In more asynchronous environments, the inclusion of time stamps on posted messages can provide a similar effect. Persistent labeling: When watching a performance, the audience expectation is for the role of a particular character to be played by a single actor (barring of course, those occasions when the character undergoes a significant change). This persistence of identity allows the audience to develop an impression of the character based on the observations they collect, even across scenes. In similar fashion, it is important to incorporate mechanisms that enable identity persistence in an online community [46]. Most often this comes through the use of a unique userid, screen name, avatar, or other identifier that distinguishes one member from another [60]. Best practice further recommends that this identifier remain constant between sessions to allow the community to gain a more permanent understanding of the member [46]. Self-presentation: To deliver a compelling performance, an actor makes available a number of presentational elements that are, in appearance and manner, characteristic of the role that is being played. Together, these acted elements present a front, which much like a stereotype, aligns the audience to the expected traits of the role [32]. “A front has a wardrobe, a setting, a decor, makeup, a script and stage direction…. A doctor, for example, has a front that includes an office, a lab coat, a stethoscope and medical jargon.” [49] In an online community, certain design practices are associated with the creation of a user’s front. These include allowing users to pick screen names, write unique signature files, and create visual avatars [60]. Yet, while each of these practices provides some degree of presentational communication, it is the personal profile that has become the primary mechanism for user representation online [26, 44, 50]. A quick review reveals that there are nearly as many designs for the online profile as there are online communities. These differences in design go beyond just site branding and visual layout. Features vary between profiles, as

does the basis of their construction. The material included in a profile can originate from system-generated attributes (the activities one conducts within a system), from community feedback (other members' interpretation of an individual or their actions), or may even be self-constructed (developed and organized by the target of the profile). It is not uncommon to find many of these elements existing within a single profile. However, though a profile may be constructed from a variety of sources, best practice suggests that a given profile be linked only to one particular front. Goffman [32] contended that an individual maintains a variety of different fronts simultaneously, including those with a professional orientation (one’s front stage self e.g., a CEO meeting with the board of directors), those that are more social (one’s back stage self e.g., that same CEO in a family setting outside of work), and those that are private (one’s core self e.g., the CEO’s undisclosed desire to be an artist). When aspects from multiple fronts collide, likely outcomes are awkwardness, embarrassment, and humiliation (picture the CEO meeting the board of directors in the same attire worn to bed). This collision of fronts was witnessed in Facebook’s ill-fated Beacon program, where e-commerce transactions conducted in other online venues were referenced automatically in users’ public profiles [49]. It has also been observed that users, looking to maintain multiple fronts within a single online community, often create several distinctive and disassociated profiles, thereby avoiding a collision of fronts. Deep profiling: It is likely that the director of a play, when considering who to cast for a given part, will take into consideration the track record of the various actors who have auditioned for the role. This track record is based on the performances that they have conducted and on the response their acting has received. It is also likely that the director will weigh the information that was found based on the reaction he or she had on casting decisions made in the past. Studies in interpersonal communication [1] similarly reveal that individuals seek out such background information both on others (to gauge the identity of potential interaction partners) and on themselves (to gain objective information about their own behaviors) in the effort to increase the efficiency of social interaction. To support this effort, online communities can adopt similar profiling capabilities. Popular examples include reputation or ranking systems, member directories, interaction archives, and other searching tools that provide an indication of “who did what” in the community [60]. Ma’s motivation for establishing these categories was to better determine the community practices associated with identity management. This examination led her to develop the theory of identity consonance in an online community, which recommended that designers seek to employ those identity-related practices best able to align, "the perceived fit between a focal person's belief of his or her identity and the recognition and verification of this identity by other community members" [60]. This fits the dramaturgical model of Goffman where the actor’s goals for the performance are in accord with the audience’s perception of the role (for instance, high identity consonance would not be perceived in an audience that laughs during a moment of serious dialogue or, conversely, an audience that expresses a lack of humor during an actor’s attempted comedic performance). To validate this theory, Ma examined members from two online communities, comparing the identity features a member used with the answers he or she gave to a survey on usage and satisfaction. In general it was found that identity consonance (and member satisfaction) increased with the use of identity supportive features. However, this verification came from the evaluation of two online communities where the norm was congruence between users’

offline and online identities. In many online communities the norms related to identity are much different. In some communities the norm includes the notion of identity deception. Identity deception and the creation of fictitious identities are well-documented behaviors that run the gamut from gender-swapping to age-deception [86]. In some communities, especially fantasy worlds, this is seen not only as the norm, but an essential part of the user experience [5]. In particular, the experimentation with identity may be very relevant for groups like adolescents, who are going through a period of identity formation [24]. Online communities present a less dangerous way for them to experience and experiment with different social roles in a less harmful setting than might otherwise be afforded in their offline lives [33, 87]. For these communities, best practice entails the inclusion of features that support a member in creating a meaningful identity with protections of anonymity and empowering the community to assist the member in developing an appropriate front. The demarcation between those communities where online identities are wholly tied to offline identities and those where the identity constructed in the community is wholly fictional remains a blurry line. For designers, it is often through supporting the interplay between the offline and online identity that selfpresentational goals are most adequately met. An example of how an online identity can support an offline identity (and vice versa) can be seen in the carryover between the virtual and the physical roles of members in the Castle online community [59]. In this community, enthusiasts converged to discuss a range of topics related to all things Disney. Especially prized in this community was insider knowledge of operations in the Disneyland theme park. Because many enthusiasts were Disney employees when acting their front stage role, they were able to pass along news and trivia to this backstage area. From this action, what would be a seemingly insignificant identity in the offline world (a maintenance worker for instance) was made into one of significance in the online world. This validation through the backstage was reflected in a greater sense of appreciation for the front stage role that, in turn, created a feedback loop that reinforced the online identity of the user.

5.5.1 How Fieldtrip supported the construction and management of member identity

Fieldtrip’s design was significantly influenced by best practices relevant to the construction and maintenance of member identity. As such, it incorporated elements from each of the design categories identified by Ma [60] as important to member identity, namely: virtual co-presence, persistent labeling, self-presentation, and deep profiling. Virtual co-presence, the first of these design categories, encompasses those elements that make a community feel like it is a populated space. Of these elements, a host of activities and components, including the continual adding of new posts (a feat ensured by the moderators), the daily additions of new films, and the use of a home page that changed in response to this newly added material converged to portray the sense that Fieldtrip was a dynamic, active online community. The notion that the community was in use was furthered by the use of time stamps added to the posts to the message boards. In addition to each post having a time stamp, each post also included the screen name of the user that made the post. All users in the community had their own unique screen name that persisted for the duration of the online community – an aspect of Fieldtrip’s design congruent with Ma’s second category of persistent labeling. As it was, however,

the unique characteristics of each of the member roles (community members, filmmakers, moderators, and researchers) necessitated the use of different design elements to support the remaining categories of self-presentation and deep profiling. Community members: The adolescent community members (non-filmmakers) selected their screen name by choosing two or three words from a list of 268 words in a process very similar to the forming of sentences using magnetic poetry.32This process was devised as a way to balance the tradeoff between preserving the anonymity of the adolescents and allowing them to express themselves as individuals. Many reasons were given by the community members as to why they choose the screen names they did (as reported in a question in the post-survey). These ranged from purely functional (e.g., being easy to remember), to descriptive (e.g., representing a certain attitude or characteristic), to reflecting desired behaviors (e.g., wanting to be more outspoken). The following examples of chosen screen names and the rationale behind their construction, illustrate this spectrum: SpiceLatteCoffee - They were 3 words that I thought that I could remember as being my own (for memory's sake). IntrovertTheFreak - I liked the words, and the meaning seemed to just show who I am. BecauseCrazyGirl - BecauseCrazyGirl kind of shows the relationship between me and other people in the way that not everyone is given a chance, or they look at you like your crazy and just don't give you a reason. SpeakUpGirl - I selected this screen name so that i could use this website as a way for me to learn to speak up about things in the world that effect me. Moderators: Like the community members, the moderators choose a screen name from a combination of two or three words, selected from the same list of 268. The initials “Mod” were added as a prefix to this selection for the purpose of distinguishing moderators from others in the community. The complete roster of moderators was then made available on the “About this project” page, with a short profile accompanying each screen name. Filmmakers: The prominent role of the filmmakers’ work in the overall design of the community allowed for other forms of selfpresentation for these users than were available to other members. Like the moderators, the filmmakers had a profile on the site. However, unlike the moderators, these profiles were distinct, with each filmmaker’s profile having its own page on the site (whereas the moderator profiles were all located on the same page). Additionally, the filmmaker profile was more complex, constructed from a variety of sources. At the top of the profile was the filmmaker’s first name (i.e. Anna, Ryan, Tierra). The first name was chosen for use as their screen names due to the likelihood of its use in the films and a desire to avoid a situation where community members sought to determine each other’s real names (as might have been occurred if the first names of the filmmakers appeared in the films, but no where else on the site). Underneath the name was a media player. This media player was initially set to play that filmmaker’s introductory film, wherein the filmmaker introduced him or herself and gave a prelude to the education and learning-related issues they would be 3

A primer on magnetic poetry and its history is available at MagneticPoetry.com (http://www.magneticpoetry.com).

investigating. Continuing down the profile, underneath the media player, was a system–generated list of the three most recent message boards the filmmaker had posted to (recall that each filmmaker had the ability to post throughout the community). Clicking any of the items in this list would take the user directly to the post made by the filmmaker in the appropriate message board. This design element was added to support a form of deep profiling, by allowing the user to build a greater understanding of a particular filmmaker by examining their interactions elsewhere in the community. The bottom of the profile housed a message board, created to provide a central location for Fieldtrip members to interact directly with, and about, the filmmaker. Along the right side of the profile was displayed a list of the films the filmmaker had completed (clicking on a film would load it, and its associated message board, into the profile’s media player and message board area respectively). Researchers: Members of the research team used their first names as their screen name, as these members were not expected to make posts to the website, there was no need for more complex screen names or the creation of profiles. One exception was the information of the contact researcher of the project, whose phone number and email address (listed as [email protected] and redirected to the contact researcher) was required to be posted on the website to conform with institutional review board requirements.

6. Guideline 6: An online community should incorporate mechanisms that build common ground between members The term common ground is used to describe a mutual understanding between two or more communicators [17]. Fundamentally, this understanding can extend to cover both: (a) knowledge about the content of the communication, or (b) knowledge about the procedure for communicating. Increased common ground between parties has been associated with more efficient communication [20]. Such gains come because less effort is needed to introduce or clarify conversational items and because the communication occurs in an organized fashion [19]. It is also conceivable that increases in common ground will lead to higher satisfaction between communicators because received messages are interpreted with the same connotation with which they were sent, a condition likely to result in a more predictable outcome. Central themes on how to build common ground encompass cueing, the exposure of shared traits or backgrounds, and the creation of new experiences that create a sense of similarity. Preece [73] used the concept of common ground as a means to inform online community designers about the relationships that exist between particular online communication mechanisms and certain types of social interaction. According to Preece [73], common ground is often built unconsciously, through a user’s detection of various cues given off by those with whom he or she is communicating. Since different types of cues improve different types of social interactions, her advice to designers was to concentrate on selecting the particular communication mechanisms best suited to deliver the cues needed for the types of interactions desired in the community. For instance, a community that thrives on rapid-pace interaction would be advised to use a

communication mechanism that supports the social cues needed to establish common ground in synchronous interactions, such as allowing the use of emoticons [73] or visually displaying the groups’ state of interaction [27, 88]. Likewise, a community that would benefit from more introspective or reflective discussion would be better served by communication mechanisms that allow for more expressive social cues that take longer to interpret or are built over time, an example being the use of persistent messages in a structured online forum. Whereas Preece’s design recommendations focused heavily on the act of social interaction, other research has aimed to understand how common ground can be built to create the pre-conditions advantageous for future online communication. By making users aware of shared traits or backgrounds or by building new experiences that create a sense of similarity, a community can form the contextual basis for new communication and establish a default lexicon for resolving ambiguity. To illustrate this point, consider how the acronym CIA is likely to mean something very different to the manager of a restaurant than to a defense contractor.43 It would be unlikely that members of an online community populated by culinary aficionados who use this acronym would need to resolve its meaning, as their understanding of their joint background would indicate the most likely definition. Accordingly, a best practice for designers is to emphasize the shared traits or background of members. Often this is accomplished through the use of metaphors incorporated into the interface of the design. For example, networked communities frequently harness an association to a physical geography as a way to stress the inherent similarity between collocated members [81]. Users, already knowledgeable about the type and nature of interaction that exists in the physical space, are able to transfer this understanding to the online space and are subsequently better able to build common ground. Harrison and Dourish [40] extend this concept by noting that it is more a notion of place that frames appropriate behavior than it is a sense of space -place, being the social approximation of a given setting (e.g., a classroom, an office) and space, being an actual location in tune with its physical arrangement (e.g., the auditorium in Old Main). Consequently, they advised designers looking to leverage physical metaphors to aid users in building common ground, look first to those metaphors allied with more generic concepts of place than to those with a distinct spatial orientation. Another means for revealing commonality is to support members in the self-disclosure of information. From the study of a large profile-centric online community platform, Lampe, Ellison and Steino [50] found a positive association between the amount of profile fields that a member filled in and the number of connections that he or she maintained with other members. More importantly, they found that the use of profile fields that referenced a common background bore a greater number of member connections than the use of profile fields related to personal interests. This finding suggests that designers pursue opportunities that allow members to disclose information with consideration given to emphasizing the self-disclosure that will be most beneficial for the formation of common ground. As a complement to best practices that suggest creating a sense of shared place by making members aware of shared traits and backgrounds, a community designer might also consider building new experiences to further create a sense of similarity among members. For this reason, Kim recommended that an online 4

Culinary Institute of America vs. Central Intelligence Agency

community foster reoccurring events and institute community rituals [45]. In her words, “[events and rituals] serve to strengthen the group’s identity by giving the participants a shared, meaningful experience” (p. 279) Such memorable occurrences provide a placeholder in the community, becoming a part of its structure. Much like friends who reference a shared experience as a way of describing something new, members involved in successful events and rituals are able to leverage these as shorthand for enhancing future interaction, creating jargon and a shibboleth to identify community elders. Owing to the belief that the kinds of events and rituals that are likely to be successful are apt to vary according to the shared purpose of the community, Kim instead offered a generic set of events and rituals intended for customization. These included meetings (regularly scheduled discussions between small groups of members), performances (similar to meetings but with the focus aimed at one member or attraction), competitions (judged contests, tournaments, and games), holidays (seasonal, cultural, and those symbolic to the community like the anniversary of when it went live), and passages and transitions (to celebrate members coming and going, changing roles, or experiencing significant offline events like graduation or parenthood). Cueing, the exposure of shared traits or backgrounds, and the creation of new experiences that produce a sense of similarity offer designers an initial set of practices from which to build common ground. However, regardless of the practices used, over time, it is likely that users will be creative in forming their own conventions. By remaining open to the discovery of these conventions, designers can help to inform the practices that will best support the common ground needs of the community.

5.6.1 How Fieldtrip incorporated mechanisms to build common ground between members

Following best practice, three chief mechanisms were leveraged in the design of the Fieldtrip online community to build common ground between its members. These included: (a) the use of threaded message boards, (b) an emphasis on the pre-existing characteristics held in common between members, and (c) the creation of new, shared experiences unique to the community. As the goal of Fieldtrip was to situate and stimulate an introspective interaction salient to education and learning, threaded message boards were selected as the most suitable communication mechanism to support the socially expressive cues this interaction required. As the overarching interaction of the online community was considered to be one that could be emotionally charged and potentially difficult for some members to discuss, the asynchronous nature of the message boards permitted members both a longer time to reflect, and a larger space to elaborate, on their posts than would otherwise be available in a more synchronous communication mechanism like a chat room. But the threaded message boards helped to build common ground in other ways. For one, the threaded design allowed for members to easily identify whether a post was in reply to another one in specific, or whether the post was made to the message board in general (responding to the “root” post). This, in conjunction with the capability to create new message boards (in the text-only channel), allowed members to enter into focused “threads” of discussion that might transpire over several days. By following a thread of discussion, those references that might be ambiguous or that might otherwise be lost if they were in the context of a larger

discussion, can be more readily understood within the scope of the closely related posts in a thread. As it were, the threaded message boards were one of the means used to enact the second best practice of emphasizing the preexisting characteristics shared by the members. By most standard demographic measures (e.g., race, age, gender), the Fieldtrip participants represented a relatively diverse group of adolescents. These outward traits aside, together these individuals formed a fairly homogenous group in terms of their general life situation. They all attended a form of secondary school, had learning as their primary responsibility, dealt with parents, teachers, and other authority figures, and by virtue of being able to enroll in Fieldtrip, shared some level of technical proficiency and access to Internet technology. It was these similarities that Fieldtrip stressed as the primary commonalities between members and which were broadcast in the films and in many of the message boards. In addition to the more generic commonalities emphasized in the films and message boards, the Fieldtrip community members were encouraged to share stories and feelings pertinent to their own experiences with education and learning. Such disclosure, it was thought, would be beneficial to the online community by revealing other similarities between members and creating new opportunities for common ground to be built. To satisfy the final best practice, of creating new, shared experiences unique to the community (and to further create a sense of similarity among members), a ritual was held at the end of the project to bring closure to the films and to explore and reinforce the larger themes apparent in them. This ritual was captured in a film and made available on the site.

7. Guideline 7: An online community should manage issues of credibility A unique conundrum confronts online communities. At the same time that users have come to rely heavily on the ability to interact socially online, the channels supporting this interaction have become subject to increasing amounts of deceptive marketing, fraudulent activity, phishing schemes, and spam. This situation has fostered a culture of skepticism regarding all manner of online communication and has brought issues of credibility to the foreground. Credibility has become such a critical issue for online communities that it stands either to enable or inhibit the social interaction that they support. Knowing those practices that might aid or hinder credibility can guide the decisions of online community designers. Researchers at Stanford have suggested the use of prominenceinterpretation theory as a method for studying how credibility can inform system design [28, 29]. This theory posits that an effective understanding of credibility requires knowledge of both the features that users perceive as important (prominence) and the process by which users assess the believability of these features (interpretation). According to this theory, visitors to an online site base their assessment of its credibility commensurate to the factors they notice and the weight that they attribute to each of these features. Interpretation, the Stanford researchers noted, can only follow prominence. Hence, if a feature goes unseen (a privacy policy for instance), it will have no effect on the perceived credibility of the system [28]. From this perspective, it makes sense to first identify those features perceived as most prominent and, once these are identified, to consider how those features may be configured to increase the likelihood that they are interpreted as credible.

Determining the prominent features related to the assessment of credibility of web-based information was the aim of one of the large-scale studies conducted by the Stanford researchers [28]. In the study, each participant was shown two online websites of the same genre picked at random from a preselected collection (e.g., a participant might be shown two medical communities such as WebMD and Dr. Koop online). The participant was then asked to judge the credibility of each site and to list the features on which they based their decision. Overall a set of seventeen features was identified which, for the purpose of this discussion, can be categorized as relating to one of four factors: information, motive, reputation, and aesthetics. The prominent indicators of each factor, along with the practices recommended to increase their interpreted credibility, are provided below: Information: The first factor regards the specifics around how information is conveyed. The way that information was structured held a spot of high prominence to users, who indicated that a consistent and logical organization of information led to higher assessments of the hosting site’s credibility. Likewise, users signified paying attention to the focus of the information within a site, noting that when it was appropriate and connected to the site’s purpose, that it engendered a higher perception of credibility. Best practice therefore, would entail the establishment of an organizational system to ensure consistency in the type and categorization of information. Such a system would likely be supported by moderators or other trained users. Regarding the organization of the information, research in navigational design has linked broader informational categorization schemes with higher user satisfaction then those schemes that have fewer toplevel categories and more subcategories [82]. Two other related concerns, the accuracy and the usefulness of information were reported in the Stanford research study as prominent issues to users looking to assess the credibility of online content. Though the Stanford researchers suggested that these issues were outside the control of the designer, looking toward other online communication mechanisms can yield insight into practices that are likely to assist users in interpreting these informational concerns. Blogging systems, for instance, append time stamps to all posts, allowing the readers of the post to have an awareness of the date that it was created. Another practice popular to blogging systems is the inclusion of “track back” mechanisms that indicate the sources of the information in the post, a practice much like the use of references in an academic paper [95]. Lastly, the presence of moderation has also been shown to impact a user’s interpretation of the accuracy of information available online. Trained moderators, especially those regarded as content experts, can increase the perception of a community’s credibility. Motive: The credibility that a user bestows upon an information system is affected by his or her perception as to why the system was created. Studies have found that users immediately recognize certain commercial features upon arriving at a website, including banner advertisements, promotional material, and marketing efforts, to which they attribute to an underlying profit motive. To an online community, the perception of a commercial interest nearly always reduces its credibility and makes its users suspect of the social interaction within it [29, 55]. In other words, “consumers recognize that advertisers have specific motives, such as persuading consumers, and therefore that advertisers' communications may be biased and varied in their truthfulness“ [62]. Such effects are particularly debilitating for communities where trust is paramount, such as health-related communities [58, 84]. It could be assumed, therefore, that a

health-related online community that hosts a significant number of advertisements for medical-related purposes, is apt to be perceived as less trustworthy than a similar health community that is free from such ads (even if the content of the community was not influenced by the advertisers, there would be an overarching perception of bias). In general, the more that is revealed about the motives of an online community, the more easily its users are able to discern the reasons for its purpose. Accordingly, several practices have been recommended to increase the transparency of the community motives, including those that concern the history of the community, its operating protocols, and its owners/maintainers. Maintaining a community’s history and having this information available to its members, gives a measure of continuity independent of individual community members (Kollock 1998). Given that the history of an online community typically extends beyond the involvement of any one member, the practice of maintaining a historical archive can give transparency as to why certain policies and procedures were developed and how certain people became leaders. Such information is particularly valuable for community newcomers. It also provides the background for a community to be transparent in its operating protocols. Transparency in the operating protocols of the community, particularly those relating to site governance and member moderation, provide indication for how the community would respond to a particular situation. This disclosure increases the acceptability of these procedures should they be needed and serves as a standard vehicle to relay the motives of the community owners/maintainers [45]. In addition to transparency regarding their motives, it is recommended that the identities of the community owners/maintainers be made known. It was reported that one of the ways that the participants in the Stanford study attempted to determine credibility was to scan for the names of those responsible for the website [28]. When this information was easily found, users rated the community as having a higher credibility than those where this information was concealed or difficult to find. Credibility was further increased when the information about the owners was coupled with methods for their contact. Reputation: The credibility that is achieved based on preexisting beliefs, perceptions, and opinions is reflected in the reputation of a community. Central to the concept of reputation is a reliance on the views of others in respect to the item that is being judged. In an online community, the discussion of reputational credibility can be considered as reflecting beliefs that are presented either from individuals or organizations that are external to the community or that are created internally to enhance the perception of prominent content. Those features of a community that reflect external credibility include those who sponsor the community and with whom the community is affiliated. Research has indicated that an impression established in one area has the tendency to influence opinion in related areas. Therefore credibility can be increased by a connection to an entity that has a high-perceived credibility [57]. For this reason, it is recommended that designers seek out and prominently display markers of a community’s relationships with positively perceived organizations. These may include certification seals, corporate or institutional logos, or even statements of endorsement [55]. Indications of external credibility, such as displaying a seal of approval from a wellknown association like the American Medical Association, can be bolstered by design practices intended to increase the amount of internal reputational credibility. An example of an internal

reputational system is seen in seller/buyer ratings made available at eBay. In this system, both parties to a transaction are allowed to rate one another at the transaction’s conclusion as a way to inform future members of their experience. These ratings are recorded and made publicly available within eBay and have been cited as one of the prominent metrics used by members for determining whether or not to enter into a transaction with another member [47, 75]. While a superior ranking is a notorious benefit to the credibility of an individual member, the mere presence of a ranking system is a benefit to the credibility of a community. In similar fashion, the inclusion of a registration system that qualifies individuals prior to allowing membership into the community (consider an online community for secondary-school teachers where a valid work email address is needed to gain entry) can assist in increasing the overall perception of credibility, assuming members are made aware of this process [55]. Aesthetics: In terms of prominence, the most frequently cited marker of a website’s credibility was its aesthetic quality [28]. Termed “design look” in the Stanford experiment, this category was multifaceted, encompassing the attractiveness, visual layout, navigational format, and informational layout to the site. Put simply by these researchers, “people equate looking good with being good.” While the amount of attention given to assessing credibility is liable to vary depending on the goal of the user (a point nicely illustrated by Lazar, Meiselwitz, and Feng [55] who compared the attention to credibility given by a user searching for information on a hometown baseball team versus a user searching for information on a rare form of cancer that they are facing), users are more likely to focus such credibility assessments on those sites that have an initial appearance of credibility. The visual perspective that a user gets from an encounter with a website can provide a first impression of its credibility. The question that inextricably arises then is “if aesthetics play such a prominent role in diagnosing credibility, then what aesthetic qualities do users interpret as lending to high credibility?” To answer this question it helps to first understand how users interpret aesthetics. Studies in human-computer interaction have indicated that users asked to critique a visual design do not first look to see what creative elements are included with a design, but rather begin to diagnose the design according to what they perceive as missing or askew from their mental model of it (the mental model often being built from experience with the current authority in the area – think Amazon for e-commerce, WebMD for health-related) [3]. For the visual design of a web site, certain elements are considered standard in professionally created online interfaces, including the use of photo-quality imagery and the consistent use of stylistic elements across different pages (font choice, sizing, the layout of content). Other elements are more linked to the purpose of the community. For example, a user arriving to the home page of a website-based online community for hockey-enthusiasts would likely notice if there was a lack of hockey related-imagery. Best practice, therefore, dictates that the purpose of the community drives the aesthetic qualities of the site.

5.7.1. How Fieldtrip managed issues of credibility

For Fieldtrip to be a viable channel for social interaction it had to be perceived as credible and authentic in the eyes of its adolescent audience. The way that its designers addressed this challenge was to use moderation and meta-data to augment the information presented in the online community, to be transparent about the motives for forming the community, to incorporate elements that asserted the reputation and integrity of the filmmakers and

moderators, and to envelope the whole of the design in a visually attractive presentation. It is important to recall that the mere presence of moderation, when known to the community, can help to raise the perceived credibility of the information the community maintains. In Fieldtrip, all users were well aware of the presence of moderation, on account of its reference during recruitment and the openness of the moderators in introducing themselves to the rest of the community. This openness extended to the message boards, where moderators responded to questions about specific aspects of moderation, as in the following interchange in the message board “Get help with the website”: ...i know the filmmakers have more freedom then we do, and i have no problem with that, but does the "obscene language" rule apply to them too? if it does, it should be changed, excessive language is bad, but it is creative expression in my opinion. (IntrovertTheFreak) As long as the language served a real purpose and is not used just to shock people or whatever it should be okay...I believe. (ModIceMan) While moderation could be seen as augmenting the credibility of the information within the community, it was not the only mechanism employed for this purpose. Attached to all posts made to the website was a set of meta-data, listing the name of the member who made the post and the date/time the post was added. The inclusion of such information revealed who made a post and when it was made – thus affording the community members additional options in judging the credibility of a post. Still, though providing vetted content, rounded out with appropriate supporting information, could help to improve credibility, these efforts would be meaningless if they were thought to have been done under the guise of an unscrupulous, ulterior motive. The way that Fieldtrip circumvented this problem was by being transparent about who was responsible for the community (several corporations, a major university, a foundation, and the US government) and by positioning the creation of Fieldtrip as being done to serve the interests of its adolescent members (as opposed to being “the other way around”, i.e., the community serving the needs of its owners). This message was buttressed in two ways. First, those adolescents enrolling in Fieldtrip were told upfront that it was a site established by industry, government, and academic partners who want to provide a venue for them to connect on issues they believe important to their education and learning. The benefit to the industry, government, and academic partners came by virtue of their being allowed to listen to what the adolescents had to say and by the benefit such information could have to society. Secondly, no advertisements or commercial messages were permitted on the Fieldtrip website. To further increase the overall perception of credibility, the transparency about who was responsible for the community and their motives was extended to include details about how to contact those in charge and about what behavior was acceptable in the community. This latter information was conveyed first to the adolescents during enrollment and later, once they entered the community website, in a section entitled “The rules for talking on Fieldtrip” linked from the home page. Based on the critical function of the moderators and filmmakers in the overall community design, it was considered important to incorporate elements to bolster the reputation and integrity of

these roles. For the moderators, this included the posting of short biographical profiles. These appeared on the fourth day of the community and their appearance was flagged the following week by both a message on the home page and the creation of a new message board. The moderator profiles typically did not extend more than a couple lines and included general demographic information and an area where each moderator could offer a more descriptive illustration of him or herself. These descriptions fell roughly evenly within two camps, either describing the future/ career plans of the moderator or offering a personal reason for their connection to the purpose of Fieldtrip. An example of a profile is provided below: ModMadPicklePrincess Gender: Female Age: 22 Major: English Lit Interests: traveling, writing, reading, dancing, the city, coffee, sleeping Bio: I'm graduating and thinking about what comes after. I hope to work for a literary magazine because poetry is my one true love. I like writing in any form really - will be writing my first (and probably last) novel this summer - it won't be any good. I love college but high school and I had a rough relationship, and that's why I'm doing this. Much like the moderators, it was considered important to tailor the design so that the filmmakers, and consequently the films they produced, would be deemed as credible. The chief concern in this area was to create a balance between the believability that the adolescents were the ones actually making the films and ensuring the films had enough of a polished look that they would be viewable. Most of the video was shot using mobile phones with video-recording capabilities (cellcams). This medium was chosen because it had a low expertise threshold for effective operation and because it is a technology that is well accepted by adolescents [56, 78]. Moreover, it is common for a cellcam to be operated by only one person, as their operation is simple enough that no professional film crew is needed, underlying the illusion that the video could have been made by the adolescent alone. In this respect, for most of the films, the professional editing that was produced on all of footage captured by the filmmakers (to improve the aesthetics of the video) was effectively hidden from the community members.

8. Guideline 8: An online community should present a consistent, predictable, and controllable user experience When users visit an online community, they bring with them expectations for how the community should operate. Some of these expectations are established ahead of time, built from the experiences they have had in similar venues and from general perceptions of how online systems work. Others are established upon arriving, created from their initial encounters in the community and refined over time through the observation of the community in use. In nearly all circumstances, when these expectations are broken, the perception of the community suffers. Understanding then, the genesis of these expectations, can yield insight and recommendations for the designers of online communities. The three general expectations that users have for the design of computer-based systems (such as online communities) were summarized by Schneiderman [83] as being, “consistent, predictable, and controllable”. Because online communities are,

by definition, Internet-based, the foundation for the expectations users have regarding consistent designs in these venues should derive from the expectations relevant to websites in general. Accordingly, many prominent web usability guidelines indicate applicability to online communities [e.g., 3, 66, 82] and offer recommendations for the selection, arrangement, and configuration of the elements of their design (with particular attention given to describing how the user interfaces of these systems should follow a constant and natural format – for instance, advising the use of common interface controls whenever possible and maintenance of a consistent navigational structure and nomenclature). However, the increased use of pre-packaged software, reusable components, common protocols, interface libraries, customizable templates, and standardization have, in general, diminished the attention that needs to be paid to ensuring consistency in the structural and physical attributes of an online community’s design. Instead, the practices most apropos to consistency are often less technical in nature. Ozok and Salvendy [71], noted that consistency in the use of language in a website had a measurable effect on users’ satisfaction and ability to use the site. As a result, they devised a set of best practices to aid designers in ensuring linguistic consistency [72]. Similar recommendations were made regarding the policies governing the training and coordination of moderators and other support roles in a community [45, 73]. While the specifics of how these roles should be performed will vary depending on the nature of the community, best practice for designing a consistent user experience would be to ensure each of the individuals in these roles act in a similar manner when responding to comparable circumstances. In addition to consistency, Schneiderman noted that a design should be predictable. He described a predictable design as one that affords the user an instinctive notion of what will happen as a result of their actions [83]. For example, a user that submits a post to an online message board would expect to see that post appear in the message board upon a page refresh. A post that would take several minutes or hours to appear would give the user a sense that the system was not predictable (unless it was made clear to the user that this was common practice and appropriate to this kind of forum). Likewise, a post submitted under one message board but appearing under another would also give an impression that the system was unpredictable. Perhaps one of the most notable markers of predictability is the responsiveness of the system. When users are kept waiting beyond a reasonable timeframe for an action to occur, or are made to experience fluctuating rates of response, they are left with the impression that the system is unpredictable [23]. The impact that this can have on the social interaction that occurs within the community can have far-reaching consequences. Consider the situation faced by social networking site Friendster, as recounted in the New York Times, “As Friendster became more popular, its overwhelmed Web site became slower. Things would become so bad that a Friendster Web page took as long as 40 seconds to download” [77] Many users, considering Friendster to be virtually inoperable, ended up abandoning the site in favor of other, more responsive (and hence, more predictable) websites. The final expectation for the design of an online community is that it be controllable. Such designs, make users feel that they are in control [83]. That is, the locus of control is centered on the users, so that they feel confidant that they are properly directing the interaction with the system. Many experts have given important suggestions in this area, including splitting functional options into related groups with relevant content [66], removing

extraneous functionality, graphics, and text that are likely to distract (or confuse) users from the main ways they are looking to interact in the community [82], and placing such elements with an, “eye for closure”, so that users are informed about the procedures necessary to complete some task [3]. Together, these suggestions might be categorized under the best practice of giving users just enough information and functionality to perform their tasks and organizing the presentation of these elements in a purposeful manner.

5.8.1 How Fieldtrip presented a consistent, predictable, and controllable user experience

A number of design best practices were employed to ensure that the experience had by members of the Fieldtrip community was one that was consistent, predictable, and controllable. Though all elements of the design were affected by these overarching concerns to some degree, a number of design decisions stand out as being made specifically to address these areas. In terms of consistency, the design of Fieldtrip was intended to appear similar to other websites popular among adolescents, with simplistic structure intended for quick, coherent navigation. For this reason, Fieldtrip adopted a columnar navigation that gave parity to the content in each of its three major channels of communication (films, filmmakers, and text-only). This created a navigation that was more broad than deep, permitting a user to reach any area of the website in a minimal number of clicks. Regarding its construction, the navigation included both textbased labels, as well as a series of icons, that were used throughout the community to uniformly designate content belonging to each of these channels. Beyond the navigational design, an emphasis was also made to ensure that the major multimedia aspects of the online interface provided a consistent user experience. For this reason, all message boards shared a common visual layout and a common process for writing and submitting posts. In the same vein, all videos were viewed using the same media player component (which itself contained a single play/pause button). To complement the simple and consistent navigation and interface controls, attention was given to the language used on the website. All language was reviewed by multiple members of the design team to make certain that it maintained a common tone and an informal linguistic style appropriate to addressing adolescents in a non-patronizing way. Predictability in the user experience with Fieldtrip came from the use of similar processes meant to evoke a transfer of learning and from instituting a controlled style of moderation. Not only did all of the message boards follow a similar arrangement between themselves, but they also followed an arrangement commonplace among large-scale text-entry programs. By example, the text box used for writing the posts was crafted to appear similar to a scaled down version of a word processor, making it likely that its users would intrinsically know how the post formatting would occur. This text box was also positioned on screen to show where, in the thread of discussion, the final post would appear. Moderation was also controlled to ensure that it occurred in a predictable manner. Prior to the launch of the online community the moderators and staff underwent training sessions that covered, among other things, a series of strategies for moderating the community. From these sessions, a standard set of moderating guidelines was developed and was prepared for display on the community website to make publicly known what the moderator response would be to certain disruptive actions a community member might cause. Once the community was live, the

moderators met together in-person two other times to confer on those situations which arose in the community, but that were not specifically discussed in the training. In these sessions the moderators were given the opportunity to come to consensus about what should be the desired course of moderation. Outside of these meetings, ongoing support for coordinating moderator responses was available in the administrative discussion board. Lastly, Fieldtrip was designed to provide a controllable a user experience. In addition to efforts made to limit its complexity (by detecting and removing unnecessary functionality and superfluous information), the layout of the website was configured with an “eye for closure”. In this manner, each page followed a top-tobottom, left-to-right orientation so that a short textual instruction telling users what they could do on the current page was listed at the top, followed by the necessary items needed to perform the instruction. In the case of making a post or creating a message board, the final submit button was located as the last item in the lower right corner of the active portion of the screen.

6. IMPROVING DESIGN BY IMPROVING GUIDELINES The contribution of this work is two-fold. Firstly, it provides a novel synthesis of the literature on existing design practice for online communities, distilling it into eight general guidelines. Secondly, it provides a thorough description of the mechanics of translating those guidelines into practice. Specifically, it details the process of instantiating these guidelines into a design artifact, the Fieldtrip online community, which is to serve as the object of study in a larger design science research project. As with all design science research, the Fieldtrip project is heavily iterative. The initial design and development, as described here, are complete. The pilot deployment and community construction has recently completed. The data from this cycle are beginning to be analyzed with the intent of empirically investigating the applicability of the eight design guidelines to a complex sociotechnical system operating in contemporary environment. It is anticipated that some guidelines will remain instructive, while others may be less relevant. In the latter case the guideline may be refined, modified, or extended to accommodate the new circumstance. (Based on the most recent results we are seeing disconformity trends for three of the guidelines). The research is being conducted in such a way as to be sensitive to capturing behaviors outside of the explanatory power of existing online community design theory. We are interested in not just validating and updating existing practice, but discovering new categories of behavior that are either not well matched to the existing design theory or that are not explained by it at all. For those categories that do not conform to the existing design guidelines, theories will be sought to provide a rationale for this non-conformance. Each category will first be sought out in the literature to see if a suggestion for the non-conformance can be uncovered, understanding that this is a fast moving field with new literature continually being published. Should none be found, new proto-theory will be generated to put forward a preliminary reason for the non-conformance and tested in future iterations of the Fieldtrip community. The end result of this project is not merely an update of online community design theory for the second decade of the new millennium, but a deeper understanding of the nature of the shifts that happen over time. We know full well that any updated guidelines will have a limited lifetime as well, but knowing what factors will presage their modification or obsolesce, will bring

greater maturity to the design of the social computing information systems that are increasingly central to all of our daily lives.

7. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Support for this project was provided by the NIH Grant #1 R41 RR024089-01, the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, and NOKIA. The authors would also like to acknowledge the contributions of the anonymous reviewers.

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