Workshop: Creating and Refining Knowledges, Identities, and Understandings in On-Line Communities Michael J. Muller and David R. Millen IBM Research / Collaborative User Experience 1 Rogers Street Cambridge MA 02142 USA +1 617 693 4235 and +1 617 693 7490
[email protected] and
[email protected] ABSTRACT
This two-day workshop examines the ways that on-line communities create and refine their shared resources, including both the formal and observable artifacts (documents, chats, threads) and the less tangible conventions, roles, and identities in the community. TOPIC OF THE WORKSHOP
On-line communities are an active research and development area for CHI, CSCW, ECSCW, PDC, and related conferences. On-line communities are also becoming an important area of development, both for internal organizational use and for customer-oriented commercial applications. We propose to continue the discussion that has been active and fertile at recent conferences [5,6,12,14,16,22,28,31,40,45,48,51,55]. At last year’s CHI workshop [14], there was a sense of too little time. We think that this feeling was a reflection of both the diversity of on-line communities that were represented in the workshop, and the richness of research that has been done in each kind of community. In keeping with suggestions from the members of the CHI 2001 workshop, we are proposing a two-day workshop for CHI 2002, to allow both (a) mutual education across the diversity of settings and types of communities, and (b) active problemanalysis and problem-solution in smaller working groups. We propose to focus the CHI 2002 workshop on the resources that on-line communities create, refine, and share. As we and others have noted, the collective goods that a community develops are often a crucial aspect of the value that communities offer both their members and their surrounding organizations [3,13,23,27,32,41,42,44]. Researchers understand certain genres of these resources, such as email, discussion threads, and simple models of persistent chats [1,3,10,11,18,13,17,27,32,44,56]. But we do not understand how to collect, refine, and manage these various genres as an integrated set of community resources. Moreover, nearly all the work on such shared resources has concerned structured or semi-structured text materials. However, certain communities such as designers [35,39] and developers [1,27] make crucial use of shared nontextual resources.
In addition to these formal or semi-formal resources, communities often develop less tangible resources such as conventions of communication, roles, and identities [3,4,8,9,10,15,16,19,20,23,24,25,29,30,28,34,36,41,46, 47,52,53,57]. We propose to have a secondary focus on these relatively intangible resources, because they are among the shared “goods” of the community, and they are essential to the functioning of the community. GOALS OF THE WORKSHOP
We propose the following goals for the workshop as a whole: • The workshop will produce an integrative survey of a sample of on-line communities, suitable for publication in interactions or SIGCHI Bulletin. This work will build upon the analyses of earlier workshop, especially [14,16,28]. The survey will characterize the diversity of on-line communities in a manner similar to that of grounded theory [50] – i.e., identifying critical dimensions that help to analyze communities, and parameterizing communities along those dimensions. We anticipate that this survey will be useful to people who want to enter this field of research, and to people who are hoping to choose among alternatives for community applications. • The workshop will develop a deeper understanding of the types and characteristics of shared resources , including useful approaches to collecting, refining, and sharing such resources (e.g., [1,13,17,27,32,44,48,56]). We anticipate that this understanding, published as part of the integrative survey or as a stand-alone document, will be useful to creators and managers of on-line communities. • The workshop will develop an analysis of roles and identities within on-line commu nities (e.g., [15,19,28,29,30,34,36,52]). We anticipate that this analysis – probably published separately – will be useful to facilitators and managers of communities, as well as to researchers who are looking for a framework of analysis of the work done within communities. We hope that this analysis will also include a section on the conventions and informal protocols that members of communi-
ties develop or adopt [2,4,8,9,10,11,19,21,23,24,25,31,47,53,56,57]).
(e.g.,
IMPORTANCE AND TIMELINESS
The study of on-line communities has been a fertile area for CHI, CSCW, ECSCW, and PDC conferences for several years, resulting in important research papers as well as the workshops that we have listed in our bibliography [5,6,12,14,16,22,28,31,40,45,48,51,55]. The complexity and diversity of community phenomena, as well as their social situatedness, require frequent face-to-face meetings of researchers, so that we can challenge one anothers’ assumptions and develop new analyses and frameworks. Communities are becoming “hot” in the commercial area (e.g., [4,15,19,24,25,26,29,30,53,56]),1 in at least two ways. First, there is growing interest in communities of practice internal to organizations [4,13,15,35,36,39,44,41,42,52,53] and among professional associations and other interorganizational groups [1,2,17,27,32,46,47,56] (e.g., in our own field, CHI, IFIP, CPSR, and UPA). Second, a growing number of commercial organizations are using community applications as part of their customer relations. CHI and related conferences are in a position to provide leadership understandings to this commercial area. PLAN OF THE WORKSHOP
The workshop will consist of plenary presentations, plenary discussions, and smaller working groups. • Day 1 Morning: Introductions, Presentations. Although we will distribute members’ position papers in advance, we realize that not everyone will have been able to read all of the position papers. Therefore, we will spend the first half-day organizing our shared work and familiarizing one another with each member’s work. Based on the position papers, we will distribute in advance an outline for presentations that will help to focus the subsequent discussions. • Day 1 Afternoon: Foundation for Small Groups and Be ginning of Small Groups’ Work. We will begin the develop dimensions that help to organize communities into an analytic framework. The goal of this activity is not to complete the framework, but to establish a basis for a small group to continue the effort more intensively. We plan to collect information for two or three pre-planned small groups: (1) the nature of tangible resources, (23?) the nature of intangible resources, perhaps treating roles and identities in separate small groups. We will also look for other, emerging topics that small groups will want to address. We intend that this plenary discussion will take 90 minutes or fewer. We plan to spend the final 90 minutes of Day 1 in small groups.
1
For brevity, we will not provide a catalogue of product descriptions, demos, or websites.
• Day 2 Morning and Early Afternoon: Small Groups (continued). We will use the morning of Day 2 to continue the work of the small groups (some members may want to move from one small group to another). We will probably hold a brief, plenary “check-in” just before lunch. Small group work will continue for the first half of the afternoon. • Day 2 Late Afternoon: Readouts from Small Groups and Future Work. We will close with a plenary discussion that reviews and integrates the work of the small groups, and that plans reports and other outcomes of the workshop. The format is somewhat flexible. We anticipate being able to accommodate anywhere from 10-30 members. Combining with other Proposals
If the workshops program receives multiple submissions in the area of on-line communities, we are open to a discussion about combining several submissions into a single workshop. PROPOSERS’ BACKGROUNDS
David Millen and Michael Muller work as research scientists at IBM Research, in the Collaborative User Experience group in Cambridge MA USA. Together and separately, they have contributed to communities research [7,32,34,35,39,41,42], and will have taught a tutorial on online communities of practice at ECSCW 2001 [33]. Michael has co-organized workshops at several CHI meetings [37,38,40,43,49], and has had planning and leadership roles at a number of CHI and PDC conferences. REFERENCES [1] Ackerman, M.S. and D.W. McDonald (1996). Answer Garden 2: Merging organizational memory with collaborative help. In Proceedings of CSCW'96. Cambridge, MA US: ACM Press. [2] Bannon, L., and Bødker, S. (1997). Constructing common information spaces. In Proceedings of ECSCW’97. Lancaster UK. [3] Bieber, M. Hiltz, S., Stohr, E., Engelbart, D., Noll, J., Turoff, M., Furuta, R., Preece, J. and Van De Walle, B. (2001). Vi rtual community knowledge evolution. In Proceedings of 34th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-34). Hawaii. Available at http://dlib.computer.org/conferen/hicss/0981/pdf/09818003.p df. [4] Brown, J.S., and Duguid, P. (1991). Organizational learning and communities-of-practice; Toward a unified view of working, learning, and innovation. Organization Science 2(1), 4057. Also in R. Cross and S. Israelit (eds.), Strategic learning in a knowledge economy: Individual, collective, and organizational learning process. Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann. [5] Bruckman, A., Erickson, T., Fisher, D., and Lueg, C. (2000). Dealing with community data . Workshop at CSCW 2000. Philadelphia USA: ACM. [6] Bruckman, A., Erickson, T., Kellogg, W., Sproull, L., Wellman, B. (1999). Research issues in the design of online
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Workshop: Creating and Refining Knowledges, Identities, and Understandings in On-Line Communities Michael J. Muller and David R. Millen IBM Research / Collaborative User Experience 1 Rogers Street Cambridge MA 02142 USA +1 617 693 4235 and +1 617 693 7490
[email protected] and
[email protected] ABSTRACT
REFERENCES
This two-day workshop examines the ways that on-line communities create and refine their shared resources, in cluding both the formal and observable artifacts (documents, chats, threads) and the less tangible conventions, roles, and identities in the community.
[1] Bruckman, A., Erickson, T., Fisher, D., and Lueg, C. (2000). Dealing with community data. CSCW 2000 workshop. Philadelphia USA: ACM.
Keywords
Communities, online communities, communities of practice, CSCW INTRODUCTION
This workshop continues the series of workshops about on-line communities that have been held at CHI, CSCW, and ECSCW conferences over the past several years [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. At last year’s workshop [3], we found it difficult to accommodate the following two needs:
[2] Bruckman, A., Erickson, T., Kellogg, W., Sproull, L., Wellman, B. (1999). Research issues in the design of online communities. CHI 99 workshop. Pittsburgh PA USA: ACM. [3] Farnham, S., Smith, M.A., Preece, J., Bruckman, A., and Schuler, D. (2001). Integrating diverse research approaches to the construction of social cyberspaces. CHI 2001 workshop. Seattle: ACM. [4] Kindberg, T. (1999). Changing places: Working in real and virtual spaceI. Workshop. London: British HCI, April 1999.
• Understand the diversity of settings and purposes of the on-line communities that are under study or development by members of the workshop
[5] Lueg, C., Davenport, E., Robertson, T., and Pipek, W. (2001) Actions and identities in virtual communities of practice. ECSCW 2001 workshop. Bonn.
• Spend sufficient time working actively on problems that we have encountered in our research and/or development
[6] Mambrey, P., and Pipek, W. (2000). Enabling communities: Communication and cooperation in and on knowledge landscapes. PDC 2000 workshop. New York: CPSR.
Following the advice of members of last year’s workshop, we are proposing a two-day format for CHI 2002. For CHI 2002, we will focus on how communities work with their shared resources. In many cases, the resources are formal documents, or informal discussions that occur in a structured environment, such as an email thread, a discussion group, or a database. In other cases, the resources may also be community conventions (e.g., how to agree or disagree politely, how to raise new questions), roles in the community (e.g., facilitator, moderator, cybrarian), and identities (e.g., expert, authority, novice, lurker). We are particularly interested in those resources that defy easy categorizing or indexing (e.g., graphics, code modules, physical machine parts; and gatekeepers, matchmakers, and people who have achieved the informal status of senior or seasoned members of their communities). We are concerned with both the social/interactive issues and the technological/implementation issues in dealing with these cases.
[7] Muller, M.J., and Friedman, J. (2000). Electronic communities: Places and spaces, contents and boundaries. CHI 2000 workshop. Den Haag: ACM. [8] Nakata, K., and Kuutti, K. (2001). Second ECSCW workshop on community knowledge. Bonn. [9] Schmidt, K., Simone, C., and Star, D.L. (2000). Classification schemes in cooperative work (workshop). CSCW 2000. Philadelphia USA: ACM. [10] Toomey, L., Tang, J., Adams, L., and Mark, G. (1998). Designing virtual communities for work. CSCW 98 workshop. Seattle: ACM. [11] Whittaker, S., Isaacs, E., O’Day, V. (1997) Widening the Net. Workshop Report on the Theory and Practice of Physical and Network Communities. SIGCHI Bulletin, 29, 3, 27-30
Call for Participation (234 words)
Creating and Refining Knowledges, Identities, and Understandings in On-Line Communities Michael J. Muller and David R. Millen, co-chairs IBM Research / Collaborative User Experience Cambridge MA USA This two-day workshop examines the ways that on-line communities create and refine their shared resources, including both the formal and observable artifacts (documents, chats, threads) and the less tangible conventions, roles, and identities in the community. We are particularly interested in the following topics: •
What formal or semi-formal shared resources are used by on-line communities? Some of these resources may be documents, images, code, or discussions and chats stored in a persistent form. Other resources are also of interest.
•
What informal or intangible shared understandings are used by on-line communities? Some of these understandings will be the identities of individuals and groups, the roles in the community, and the working practices or social conventions among members of the community.
•
How are the shared resources created, refined, and managed? Is there an “object lifecycle” for formal or semi-formal objects? Is there a process, protocol, or evolution for identities, roles, and conventions?
Participation in the workshop is by invitation, based on a position paper stating the author(s)’ research, theory, or practice in one or more of the areas described above. Submissions should be electronic, in ASCII text, Word format, or PDF. Please send position papers or inquiries to Michael Muller (
[email protected]) or David Millen (
[email protected] ).
