Interested in free and open source software? Want to hear insights from researchers, community leaders, contributors, and advocates working on and with FOSS?
We will be running the Science of Community track on Friday August 2nd and Saturday August 3rd. We’re excited to have a number of awesome presenters speaking about their work. Check out the schedule below:
The Science of Community track is inspired by the CDSC Science of Community Dialogues, which aim to bring together practitioners and researchers to discuss scholarly work that is relevant to the efforts of practitioners. As researchers, we get so much from the communities we work with and study and we want them to also learn from the research they so generously take part in. While the Dialogues cover a broad range of topics and communities, FOSSY presentations focus on how that work related to free and open source software communities, projects, and practitioners.
Collaborations between practitioners and researchers can be transformative! Let’s get to know each other.
Tickets are still available at every price tier, check them out here.
CDSC group photo taken at Northwestern in Fall, 2023
We love celebrating the accomplishments of CDSC lab and community members! Here’s a less-than-complete, not-quite-brief summary of some of those accomplishments over the past academic year+ (since the last time we wrote a post like this). Congratulations to everyone involved—including those members of the CDSC community not named below. It truly takes a village to do all of these things and we appreciate the achievements and contributions of all.
Awards, degrees, and fellowships:
Hazel Chiu received a Top Paper Award from the International Communication Association (ICA) Communication and Technology (CaT) Division for “User Acceptance of Multiple Accounts Management on SNS:
A Technology Acceptance Model Perspective.”
Nathan TeBlunthuis received a Top Paper Award from the ICA Computational Methods (CM) Division for “Misclassification in Automated Content Analysis Causes Bias in Regression. Can We Fix It? Yes We Can!.”
Dyuti Jha and Ryan Funkhouser were named runners-up for the National Communication Association (NCA) Sam Keltner Top Student paper for “Freedom to flourish: A systematic review of the literature at the intersection of resilience, communication, and peacebuilding.”
Floor Fiers completed their Ph.D. and will begin a new role as an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Amsterdam.
Nathan TeBlunthuis will begin a new role as an Assistant Professor in the Information School at the University of Texas, Austin.
Tommy Rousse completed his J.D. and MTS Ph.D. at Northwestern.
Sohyeon Hwang will begin a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Information Technology & Policy (CITP) at Princeton University in the Fall.
Yibin Fan completed a Master’s degree in Communication at the University of Washington.
Benjamin Mako Hill was a fellow at CITP at Princeton University during 2023-2024.
Emily Zou graduated with honors from Northwestern in American Studies with her thesis, “`Did Bro Just Grief the US Government?’: How online community identities create new genres of political communication.” Starting in the Fall, Emily will begin a Ph.D. in Communication at Stanford University.
Carolyn Zou was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP).
Publications:
Members of the lab published more than 15 papers and articles. This is too many to list here, but you should check our publications page for more.
Talks and conference presentations:
Members of the group gave way too many presentations to list.
Select venues include: Seattle GNU/Linux Conference (SeaGL); Free and Open Source Software Yearly Conference (FOSSY); PyCon; Wikimania; the Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association (ICA); the Annual Meeting of the National Communication Association (NCA); the ACM Conferences CSCW and CHI; the Yale Internet & Society Project; the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; Stanford University HCI Speaker Series; University of Maryland, College Park; Rutgers University; Cornell Tech, Digital Life Institute; Learning Planet Institute, Paris; the University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg School for Communication; The Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Bellagio, Italy; and the Stanford Trust & Safety Research Conference, the IEEE International Conferences on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM) and Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER).
Teaching:
A selection of the courses taught or TA’ed by members of the group in the past year include:
We will be running the Science of Community track on Friday August 2nd and Saturday August 3rd. Check out the full schedule here.
We’re excited to have a number of really amazing speakers presenting their work. Check out the list below:
Kaylea and Matt will be presenting again!
The Science of Community track is inspired by the CDSC Science of Community Dialogues, which aim to bring together practitioners and researchers to discuss scholarly work that is relevant to the efforts of practitioners. As researchers, we get so much from the communities we work with and study and we want them to also learn from the research they so generously take part in. While the Dialogues cover a broad range of topics and communities, FOSSY presentations focus on how that work related to free and open source software communities, projects, and practitioners.
We hope to see you at FOSSY. Even if you can’t make it to our sessions, we’ll be at the conference so stop by and say hello!
Worried you didn’t submit your FOSSY proposal on time? Well fear not, the deadline has been extended to Tuesday, June 18th. Submit your proposal today!
Does your work touch open source, communities, technology, or cooperation? Do you want to help bridge the gaps between research and practice? Join us at the Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference (FOSSY) this summer!
We’ll be running the Science of Community track, and are looking for presenters to speak to an audience of FOSS practitioners, developers, community organizers, contributors, and people just generally into and curious about FOSS.
FOSSY is a low-stress opportunity to talk to people who your work can benefit. For topics, consider presenting implications from past papers, synthesizing work from your field overall, or floating ideas and problems (lightning talks! long talks! short talks!). A full track description and answers to common questions is available on our wiki.
The (extraordinary!) panelists were Jaz-Michael King (IFTAS), Christine Lemmer-Webber (Spritely Institute), and Bryan Newbold (BlueSky). The discussion ranged far and wide over some key background on decentralized and federated social media as well as some urgent challenges and opportunities in the space.
The recording of the session is up and you can watch it here (or in the frame below).
Thanks to the panelists, Madison Deyo, and the HCI+D team for making this happen!
Does your work touch open source, communities, technology, or cooperation? Do you want to help bridge the gaps between research and practice? Join us at FOSSY! The Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference (FOSSY) is back this summer and the call for proposals is open!
We’ll be running the Science of Community track, and are looking for presenters to speak to an audience of FOSS practitioners, developers, community organizers, contributors, and people just generally into and curious about FOSS.
The Science of Community track is inspired by the CDSC Science of Community Dialogues, which bring together practitioners and researchers to discuss scholarly work that is relevant to the efforts of practitioners. As researchers, we benefit so much from the communities we work with and study and we want them to also learn from the research they so generously take part in. While the Dialogues cover a broad range of topics and communities, FOSSY presentations will focus on how that work relates to free and open source software communities, projects, and practitioners.
FOSSY is a low-stress opportunity to talk to people who your work can benefit. For topics, consider presenting implications from past papers, synthesizing work from your field overall, or floating ideas and problems (lightning talks! long talks! short talks!). A full track description and answers to common questions is available on our wiki.
How can we create more trustworthy and accountable social media that support diverse communities? Decentralized social media—systems that allow users to connect and communicate across independent services like Mastodon or BlueSky—offer promising alternatives to centralized commercial platforms like Instagram, TikTok, or X. However, decentralized social media also face urgent design challenges, especially when it comes to content integrity, protecting community trust and safety, and forging collective governance. What happens when there is no central authority to review posts or ban abusive users? How can networks of autonomous communities build and adopt systems to govern effectively? What critical infrastructure can prevent the pervaisve harms of existing social media and support the integrity of public discourse?
Join Northwestern’s Center for Human-Computer Interaction + Design (HCI+D) and the Community Data Science Collective (CDSC) for an engaging conversation about the challenges and opportunites of decentralized social media on May 23rd from 4 to 5:15 p.m. CST. This panel features designers, leaders, and researchers involved in federated social media and will address opportunities for effective design and governance in this space.
Panelists include Jaz-Michael King, Bryan Newbold, and Christine Lemmer-Webber. Short presentations will be followed by discussion and Q&A moderated by Aaron Shaw (Northwestern HCI+D, CDSC).
Moderator: Aaron Shaw, photograph by Nikki Ritcher Photography
Speaker: Christine Lemmer-Webber, Executive Director of Spritely Networked Communities Institute
Christine has devoted her life to advancing user freedom. Realizing that the federated social web was fractured by a variety of incompatible protocols, she co-authored and shepherded ActivityPub‘s standardization. She has also contributed to many other free and open source projects, including co-founding MediaGoblin.
Christine established the open source Spritely Project to solve known problems in existing centralized and decentralized social media platforms and to re-imagine the way we build networked applications – work that now continues here at the institute under her guidance as Executive Director.
Speaker: Jaz-Michael King, Executive Director of IFTAS (Federated Trust & Safety)
An accomplished professional with an extraordinary record of enabling data-driven decisions, developing innovative products, creating new business opportunities, driving strong operational performance, and building high-performing, agile teams. Highly versatile, with extensive experience in data and technology from a privacy, improvement, and reporting perspective, Jaz has a proven record in building solutions for non-profit programs. As Executive Director of IFTAS, Jaz is now focused on independent, open Social Web activities, with the aim of creating #BetterSocialMedia by supporting trust and safety at scale in federated social media networks.
Speaker: Bryan Newbold, Protocol Engineer at BlueSky
Bryan works at Bluesky, a startup company building a federated social media protocol called “atproto”. Until a few months ago he worked at the Internet Archive collecting scientific research datasets and publications, and created scholar.archive.org. And before that he worked on infrastructure at Stripe, attended the Recurse Center in New York City, and built Atomic Magnetometers for a small New Jersey company called Twinleaf.
Over that same time period, Bryan climbed up and down the ladder of abstraction, obtaining an undergraduate degree in physics (at MIT), operating under-ice robots in Antarctica, developing open hardware lab instrumentation for large-scale brain probing (at LeafLabs), cataloging hundreds of millions of electronics components (at Octopart), and improved production service reliability at Stripe (a financial infrastructure start-up).
Bryan is a transplant from the East Coast and enjoys the road biking, large trees, generous salads, used bookstores, and world-class tech non-profits. This will be his third year serving on the Code of Conduct team at DWeb Camp.
A screenshot of the configuration panel for Moderator functions of a popular end-user bot called Dyno, adopted by millions of communities on Discord.
Bots made by end users are crucial to the success of online communities, helping community leaders moderate content as well as manage membership and engagement. But most folks don’t have the resources to develop custom bots and turn to existing bots shared by their peers. For example, on Discord, some especially popular bots are adopted by millions of communities. However, because these bots are ultimately third-party tools — made by neither the platform nor the community leader in question — they still come with several challenges. In particular, community leaders need to develop the right understandings about a bot’s nature, value, and use in order to adopt it into their community’s existing processes and culture.
In organizational research, these “understandings” are sometimes described as technological frames, a concept developed by Orlikowski & Gash (1994) as they studied why technologies became used in unexpected ways in organizational settings. When your technological frames are well-aligned with a tool’s design, you can imagine that it is easier to assess whether that tool will be useful and can be smoothly incorporated into your organization as intended. In the context of online communities, well-aligned frames can not only reduce the labor and time of bot adoption, but also help community leaders anticipate issues that might cause harm to the community. Our new paper looks to communities on Discord and asks: How do community leaders shift their technology frames of third-party bots and leverage them to address community needs?
Emergent social ecosystems around bot adoption
Our study interviewed 16 community leaders on Discord, walking through their experiences adopting third-party bots for their communities. These interviews underscore how community leaders have developed social ecosystems around bots: organicuser-to-user networks of resources, aid, and knowledge about bots across communities.
Despite the decentralized arrangement of communities on Discord, users devised and took advantage of formal and informal opportunities to revise their understandings about bots, both supporting and constraining how bots became used. This was particularly important because third-party bots pose heightened uncertainties about their reliability and security, especially for bots used to protect the community from external threads (such as scammers). For example, interviewees laid out concerns about whether a bot developer could be trusted to keep their bot online, to respond to problems users had, and to manage sensitive information. The emergent social ecosystems helped users get recommendations from others, assess the reputation of bot developers, and consider whether the bot was a good fit for them along much more nuanced dimensions (in the case of one interviewee, the values of the bot developer mattered as well). They also created opportunities for people to directly get help in setting up bots and troubleshooting them, such as via engaged discussions with other users who had more experience.
Our findings underscore a couple of core reasons why we should care about these social ecosystems:
Closing gaps in bot-related skills and knowledge. Across interviews, we saw patterns of people leveraging the resources and aid in social ecosystems to move towards using more powerful but complex bots. Ultimately, people with diverse technical backgrounds (including those who stated they had no technical background) were able to adopt and use bots — even bots involving code-like configurations in markdown languages that might normally pose barriers. We suggest that the diffusion of end-user tools on social platforms be matched with efforts to provide bottom-up social scaffoldings that support exploration, learning, and user discussion of those tools.
Changing perceptions of the labor involved in bot adoption. The process of bot adoption as a deeply social one appeared to impact how people saw the labor they invested into it, shifting it into something fun and satisfying. Bot adoption was both collaborative, involving many individuals as a user discovered, evaluated, set up, and fine-tuned bots; and communal, with community members themselves taking part in some of these steps. We suggest that bot adoption can provide one avenue to deepen community engagement by creating new ways of participating and generating meta discussions about the community, as well as the platform.
Shaping the assumptions around third-party tools. Social ecosystems enabled people to cherry-pick functions across bots, enabling creative wiggle room in curating a set of preferred functions. At the same time, people were constrained by social signals about what bots are and can do, why certain bots are worth adopting, and how the bot is used. For example, people often talked about genres of bots even though no such formal categories existed. We suggest that spaces where leaders from different communities interact with one another to discuss strategies and experiences can be impactful settings for further research, intervention, and design ideas.
Ultimately, the social nature of adopting third-party bots in our interviews offers insight into how we can better support the adoption of valuable user-facing tools across online communities. As online harms become more and more technically sophisticated (e.g., the recent rise of AI-generated disinformation), user-made bots that quickly respond to emerging issues will play an important role in managing communities — and will be even more valuable if they can be shared across communities. Further attention to the dynamics that enable tools to be used across communities with diverse norms and goals will be important as the risks that communities face, and the tools available to them, evolve.
Engage with us!
If you have thoughts, ideas, questions, we are always happy to talk – especially if you think there are community-facing resources we can develop from this work. There are a few ways to engage with us:
We’re going to be at CHI! The Community Date Science Collective will be presenting work from group members and affiliates. CHI is taking place in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi from May 11th – 16th.
By Robert Linsdell from St. Andrews, Canada – Flight from Honolulu to Hilo. Over Sand Island and Honolulu (503729), CC BY 2.0
Carolyn Zou (Northwestern University) will be presenting with coauthor Helena Vasconcelos on their work “Validation Without Ground Truth? Methods for Trusts in Generative Simulations” at the CHI workshops HEAL (Human-Centered Evaluation and Auditing of Language Models) and TREW (Trust and Reliance in Evolving Human-AI Workflows). They will be presenting posters at both sessions and have been selected as a highlighted paper for HEAL and will be giving a presentation on Sunday, May 12th.
Madison Deyo has recently joined the CDSC as a Program Coordinator and we couldn’t be more thrilled to welcome her to the team!
Madison is based at Northwestern. With the CDSC, Madison’s role includes a mix of event planning and coordination; outreach and communications; and supporting the operations of the group. She also works with the Northwestern Center for Human-Computer Interaction + Design. Madison brings experience working with community-based non-profits in several different capacities.
Madison currently lives in Chicago, and grew up in Wisconsin, where she attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There, she received my B.S. in Art (with a focus on illustration) and Communications: Radio-TV-Film. In addition to her position at Northwestern, Madison also works as a freelance artist designing mead labels, tattoos, and occasionally album/EP covers. You can check out her portfolio.
