Category: Community Dialogues

We had another Science of Community Dialogue! This most recent one was themed around informal learning, talking about communities as informal learning spaces and the sorts of tools and habits communities can adopt to help learners, mentors, and newcomers. We had presentations from Ruijia (Regina) Cheng (University of Washington, CDSC) and Dr. Denae Ford Robinson (Microsoft, University of Washington).

Regina Cheng covered three related research projects and relevant findings:

• Ruijia Cheng and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2022. “Many Destinations, Many Pathways: A Quantitative Analysis of Legitimate Peripheral Participation in Scratch.” https://doi.org/10.1145/3555106

• Ruijia Cheng, Sayamindu Dasgupta, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2022. “How Interest-Driven Content Creation Shapes Opportunities for Informal Learning in Scratch: A Case Study on Novices’ Use of Data Structures.” https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3502124

• Ruijia Cheng and Jenna Frens. 2022. “Feedback Exchange and Online Affinity: A Case Study of Online Fanfiction Writers.” https://doi.org/10.1145/3555127

Participants collaboratively put together three takeaways from Regina Cheng’s presentation.

We often talk about wanting to support “learning” in some general sense, but a critically important question to ask is “learning about what.” Let’s say we want people to learn three things A, B, and C. The kinds of actions or behaviors that support learning goal A often have no effect on B, and C. And sometimes they actively hurt it. We need to be more specific about what we want people to learn because there are tradeoffs.

Social support is wonderful in that users create examples and resources and answer questions. But it also has this narrowing effect. There’s a piling-on effect that makes it easier and easier (and more likely!) to learn the things that folks have learned before and less likely that people learn anything else.

Feedback is not about information transfer, it’s about relationships. To best promote learning, we should create rich, legitimate, inclusive social environment. These are perhaps good things to do anyway.

Dr. Denae Ford Robinson focused on free and open source software (FOSS) communities as a case study of learning communities. She covered theory, needs, and demonstrated tools designed to help with the mentorship and the learning process.

Community-driven settings like FOSS (and social-good oriented projects in particular) rely enormously on volunteers and/or people opting into participation in ways that create huge challenges related to promoting project sustainability: the most active participants are overloaded in a way that is a recipe for burnout.

The path to sustainability involves attracting, retaining, and then sustaining contributions and understanding these processes as both (a) part of the lifecycle of a user and (b) part of a set of dynamics and lifecycle within the community (e.g., dynamics of community growth).

Approach 1 involves providing new information to help maintainers understand how things are going in their communities. A lack of insight and easy access to data is a cause of inefficiency and burnout.

Approach 2 involves making specific, structured recommendations to maintainers based on the experience of others in the past to do things like add tags and to shape behavior.

Approach 3 involves automating aspects of identifying and recognizing work (and perhaps other tasks) as a way of promoting newcomer experiences and reducing the load on maintainers for doing that.

This event and some of the research presented in it were supported by multiple awards from the National Science Foundation (DGE-1842165; IIS-2045055; IIS-1908850; IIS-1910202), Northwestern University, the University of Washington, and Purdue University.

We recently held our second Community Dialogue around the theme of anonymity and privacy. Kaylea Champion presented on the role of anonymity in peer-contribution communities. Dr. Shruti Sannon joined us from the University of Michigan and talked about privacy in the gig economy.

What’s Anonymity Worth (Kaylea Champion)

Anonymity can protect and empower contributors in communities. Anonymity can make people feel safer or actually be safer. For example: Wikipedia editors who are working on controversial pages within contested geographies may be safer when they are able to contribute anonymously. Anonymous contribution is not without problems, as it can also empower trolls, harassers, and other bad actors. For more details, and actions you can take or policies to recommend within your communities, watch the video of Kaylea Champion’s presentation below.

Privacy and Surveillance in the Gig Economy (Dr. Shruti Sannon)

Gig workers can be asked or coerced to give up privacy in exchange for money through the design of the gig platforms they are using or by request of customers. Gig workers also use surveillance tools as a means of protecting themselves — some ride share drivers have cameras in their cars for this purpose. Dr. Sannon shared the broader implications of this situation, and what it can mean outside of the gig economy. To learn more, watch the video below.

Join us!

You can subscribe to our mailing list! We’ll be making announcements about future events there. It is a low volume mailing list.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to speakers Kaylea Champion and Shruti Sannon. The vision for this event borrows from the User and Open Innovation workshops organized by Eric von Hippel and colleagues, as well as others. This event and the research presented in it were supported by multiple awards from the National Science Foundation (DGE-1842165; IIS-2045055; IIS-1908850; IIS-1910202), Northwestern University, the University of Washington, and Purdue University.

This winter, the Community Data Science Collective launched a Community Dialogues series. These are meetings in which we invite community experts, organizers, and researchers to get together to share their knowledge of community practices and challenges, recent research, and how that research can be applied to support communities. We had our first meeting in February, with presentations from Jeremy Foot and Sohyeon Hwang on small communities and Nate TeBlunthius and Charlie Keine on overlapping communities.

Watch the introduction video starring Aaron Shaw!

What we covered

Here are some quick summaries of the presentations. After the presentations, we formed small groups to discuss how what we learned related to our own experiences and knowledge of communities.

Finding Success in Small Communities

Small communities often stay small, medium stay medium, and big stay big. Meteoric growth is uncommon. User control and content curation improves user experience. Small communities help people define their expectations. Participation in small communities is often very salient and help participants build group identity, but not personal relationships. Growth doesn’t mean success, and we need to move beyond that and solely using quantitative metrics to judge our success. Being small can be a feature, not a bug!

We built a list of discussion questions collaboratively. It included:

• Are you actively trying to attract new members to your community? Why or why not?
• How do you approach scale/size in your community/communities?
• Do you experience pressure to grow? From where? Towards what end?
• What kinds of connections do people seek in the community/communities you are a part of?
• Can you imagine designs/interventions to draw benefits from small communities or sub-communities within larger projects/communities?
• How to understand/set community members’ expectations regarding community size?
• “Small communities promote group identity but not interpersonal relationships.” This seems counterintuitive.
• How do you managing challenges around growth incentives/pressures?

Why People Join Multiple Communities

People join topical clusters of communities, which have more mutualistic relationships than competitive ones. There is a trilemma (like a dilemma) between large audience, specific content, and homophily (likemindness). No community can do everything, and it may be better for participants and communities to have multiple, overlapping spaces. This can be more engaging, generative, fulfilling, and productive. People develop portfolios of communities, which can involve many small communities..

Questions we had for each other:

• Do members of your community also participate in similar communities?
• What other communities are your members most often involved in?
• Are they “competing” with you? Or “mutualistic” in some way?
• In what other ways do they relate to your community?
• There is a “trilemma” between the largest possible audience, specific content, and homophilous (likeminded/similar folks) community. Where does your community sit inside this trilemma?

Slides and videos

• Slides from Finding Success in Small Communities
• Slides from Why People Join Multiple Communities

How you can get involved

You can subscribe to our mailing list! We’ll be making announcements about future events there. It will be a low volume mailing list.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to speakers Charlie Kiene, Jeremy Foote, Nate TeBlunthius, and Sohyeon Hwang! Kaylea Champion was heavily involved in planning and decision making. The vision for the event borrows from the User and Open Innovation workshops organized by Eric von Hippel and colleagues, as well as others. This event and the research presented in it were supported by multiple awards from the National Science Foundation (DGE-1842165; IIS-2045055; IIS-1908850; IIS-1910202), Northwestern University, the University of Washington, and Purdue University.

Session summaries and questions above were created collaboratively by event attendees.