Mining Social Theory to Build Member-Maintained Communities.
Dan Cosley · 2005
Online communities need regular maintenance activities such as moderation and data input, tasks that typically fall to community owners. Allowing all members to perform maintenance might make communities more robust and valuable. A key challenge in creating member-maintained communities is that we have little knowledge of how to design interfaces to motivate contributors. Social science theories of motivation may be helpful for making and evaluating design choices. We have used Karau and Williams ’ collective effort model to develop and evaluate designs that motivate members by making salient the unique contributions they could offer to a group. We also show that using oversight to check contributions to a community database of movies increases members ’ motivation to contribute and that peers can provide motivation as well as experts in this domain. Our experiments suggest a number of design elements and guidelines for increasing members ’ motivation to maintain their communities. The Problem Max is the movie czar, the de facto dictator of which movies get into the MovieLens recommender system. He’s the guardian of quality, the finder of movie facts, the defender of decency–the final authority on film. This suits Max well; he’s pleased with the quality of the movie database. Not all MovieLens users agree, however. Max is busy and adds movies slowly, and members sometimes disagree with his criteria for including movies. Useful information (DVD releases, MPAA ratings, etc.) is also not in the database. Max’s community is not unique—many groups have a Max. Most members ’ contributions to an online community pertain to what Preece calls its purpose (Preece 2000). Members post to discussion groups, rate movies, receive recommendations, and read each others ’ blogs. These contributions are visibly important and constitute the day to day business of the community. However, communities need inputs besides conversation, such as moderation, governance, and the maintenance of databases (i.e., members, movies, FAQs, and histories). These duties usually fall to the owners of the