Activating Online Collaborative Communities

Aldo de Moor CommunitySense

ALOIS 2008

Collaborative communities

Communities Strong, lasting interactions Binding community members Common space

Collaborative communities Common goals Effective/efficient communication essential

Perform/coordinate work Community governance structures/processes Sense of community

Communication support failure

Communication

Purposes

Productive Focused Sustained Evolving

Communication

Forms

Discussing Debating Questioning Consoling …

Community Context

Domains Purposes Activities

Communication

Support ?

Social

System

Technical

System

The problem No longer custom-designed communication support

systems Instead, systems of tools

Actual and intended use differ strongly Interaction complexities

R&D problem Not lack of motivation

Many self and other-oriented motives to get critical mass, e.g. in Wikipedia

Lack of activation Fragmentation of communicative acts across tool system

functionalities Objectives

1. Frame these activation problems2. Model socio-technical design solutions

Towards collaborative community activation

Collaborative community activation supporting the initiation, execution, and evaluation of

goal-oriented computer-mediated communication processes to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of collaboration

Approach Digital tutorial case Theoretical grounding

Language/Action Perspective Pragmatic Web Actability / Interactivity

Conceptual model of online collaborative communities

Collaboration patterns

Case: a digital tutorial community

Who 19 Information Management students

What create group report with design of parliamentary research

information system When

8 weeks + evaluation session (2004) How

Face-to-face lectures, parallel digital tutorial Tool system

Blackboard Set of blogs GRASS (Group Report Authoring Support System) Scoring tool

Authoring with GRASS

Authoring with GRASS (2)

Digital tutorial workflow

Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 5 Week 6 Week 7 Week 8

Theory interpretation (blogs)

Case information collection (blog)

Report authoring (GRASS)

Workflow meets tool system

GRASS

Theory

Blogs

Case

Blog

Collect info Discuss

Scoring Substantiate claims

Define questions Define/take positions Define arguments pro/con Edit report

Evaluate contributions

Results 63-page report created in 8 weeks by 18 authors Most students scored much higher than the minimum

required Survey among students

Digital tutorial better than face-to-face tutorial Overall design of tool system plus workflow adequate Blog posting/commenting plus GRASS position definition/taking

and argument creation functionalities easy to learn Problems

Blog creation easy, however, following what was happening too difficult Indented instead of sequential commenting preferred Fragmentation of discussion consided a major problem

→ ‘blog monitor’ helped to reduce sense of fragmentation and to increase participation

Activation lessons learnt

Incentives for individual students to participate Minimum score required Overview of current scores per student Vouchers

Improving the overview of activities within individual tools Indented instead of linear comments in blog

Creating “meta-tools” to keep overview of activities across tools “Blog monitor”

Modeling pragmatic communication processes

Theories Language/Action Perspective

Focus on communicative inter-actions Pragmatic Web

Applying appropriate web technologies to help improve the quality and legitimacy of collaborative, goal-oriented discourses in communities (Schoop et al 2006)

Build a socio-technical infrastructure that supports the negotiation of meaning and the coordination of action (Aakhus 2007)

Research question How to model activation in collaborative communities using

distributed tool systems?

Modeling “interactability”

Actability The ability to act and to support human action Promoting appropriate social behaviour, mediated by rules

and norms Many dimensions, such as “action potentiality”

The set of communicative actions the system affords and supports (Agerfalk 2004)

Interactivity The degree to which two or more communicating parties can

act on each other, the communication medium, and on the synchronization of these influences

Dimensions: active control, two-way communication, synchronicity

Active control problematic: gap between structural and experienced aspects

A conceptual model of online collaborative communities (1)

Tool system System of integrated and customized tools tailored to the

specific information, communication, and coordination requirements of a collaborative community

Co-evolves with usage context, specific to each community

Tool system levels Systems: “group report writing system” Tools: “blogs”, “courseware”, “authoring support tool” Modules: “position definition/taking”, “argument creation” Functions: “add argument pro”, “add argument con”

A conceptual model of online collaborative communities (2)

Usage context Goals

Activities: operationalized goals, with deliverable

“writing a group report” Aspects: abstract goals, across processes and structures

“legitimacy”, “efficiency” Actors

Detailed role ontologies

“Administrator”, “Facilitator”, “Member” “Position Defender”, “Argument Summarizer”, “Report

Conclusion Editor” Domains

Professional culture, work practices, …

Collaboration patterns

Patterns Define relatively stable solutions to recurring problems at

the right level of abstraction Collaboration patterns

Capture socio-technical lessons learnt in optimizing the effectiveness and efficiency of collaboration processes

Typology of collaboration patterns (De Moor 2006)

Goal patterns Communication patterns Information patterns Task patterns Meta-patterns

Collaboration pattern typology (1)

Goal patterns Capture community and individual objectives

“finished group report within two weeks”, “produce 3 arguments contra position X”

Collaboration pattern typology (2)

Communication patterns Communicative workflow and norm definitions describing

acceptable and desired communicative interactions (initiation, evaluation stages of comm. workflows)

“Each student must define positions and pro-arguments for an assigned report section. All students may comment on these positions, but assigned students must define arguments pro or con. At the end of this stage, all students must take the defined positions.”

Information patterns Conceptualizations of the content knowledge obtained

from knowledge production activities

“Each blog post and comment can be marked up with a category from a predefined list describing the topic of the discussion”

Collaboration pattern typology (3)

Task patterns Capture which information patterns are to be created in

particular steps in a communication process, describing the role of content (execution stage of comm. workflows)

“Each new blog post and comment is categorized by students playing the Discussion Summarizer role at the end of each day.”

Meta-patterns Conceptual patterns necessary to interpret, validate, link,

and assess the quality of other collaboration patterns

“Any goal pattern representing the topic of the report must have been discussed in a consensus-building communication pattern applying to all members of the digital tutorial community.”

The case: an information pattern

The case: an enabled communication pattern (before)

The case: an enabled communication pattern (after)

Quo vadis?

Activation of online collaborative communities not trivial The concept of activation needs to be better understood

LAP, PragWeb, actability, interactivity… Socio-technical design patterns in their infancy

Pragmatic argumentation structures Norm-driven activation mechanisms Other fields: community informatics, coordination

theory, CSCW, interoperability research, empirically grounded pattern languages, conceptual graphs…

The cybersky is the limit…

Communicating across virtual worlds