TY - CONF T1 - The Way I Talk to You: Sentiment Expression in an Organizational Context T2 - ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’12) Y1 - 2012 A1 - Jiang Yang A1 - Lada A. Adamic A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Wen, Zhen A1 - Lin, Ching-Yung KW - CMC KW - collaborative help KW - online communities AB -

Sentiment is a rich and important dimension of social interaction. However, its presence in computer-mediated communication in corporate settings is not well understood. This paper provides a preliminary study of people’s expression of sentiment in email conversations in an organizational context. The study reveals that sentiment levels evolve over time during the process of newcomers’ socialization, that sentiment varies according to tie-strength with the recipient, and that sentiment patterns can be indicative of one’s position in the corporate social network as well as job performance. These findings shed light on the complex and dynamic nature of sentiment patterns, and would inspire further explorations and applications of sentiment analysis in organizations.

JF - ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’12) UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Rating Friends Without Making Enemies T2 - Proceedings of the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media Y1 - 2011 A1 - Lada A. Adamic A1 - Lauterbach, Debra A1 - Teng, CY A1 - Mark S. Ackerman KW - couch surfing KW - e-communities KW - friends KW - online communities KW - rating systems KW - trust AB -

As online social networks expand their role beyond maintaining existing relationships, they may look to more faceted ratings to support the formation of new connections between their users. Our study focuses on one community employing faceted ratings, CouchSurfing.org, and combines data analysis of ratings, a large-scale survey, and in-depth interviews. In order to understand the ratings, we revisit the notions of friendship and trust and uncover an asymmetry: close friendship includes trust, but high levels of trust can be achieved without close friendship. To users, providing faceted ratings presents challenges, including differentiating and quantifying inherently subjective feelings such as friendship and trust, concern over a friend’s reaction to a rating, and knowledge of how ratings can affect others’ reputations. One consequence of these issues is the near absence of negative feedback, even though a small portion of actual experiences and privately held ratings are negative. We show how users take this into account when formulating and interpreting ratings, and discuss designs that could encourage more balanced feedback.

JF - Proceedings of the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Activity lifespan: An analysis of user survival patterns in online knowledge sharing communities T2 - International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM’10) Y1 - 2010 A1 - Jiang Yang A1 - Wei, Xiao A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Lada A. Adamic KW - community evolution KW - e-communities KW - intercultural KW - online communities KW - Q&A KW - QA communities KW - survival analysis AB -

Retaining participation is crucial for information services, online knowledge sharing services among them. We present the first comprehensive analysis of users’ activity lifespan across three predominant online knowledge sharing communities. Extending previous work focusing on initial interactions of new users, we use survival analysis to quantify participation patterns that can be used to predict individual lifespan over the long term. We discuss how cross site differences in user participation and the underlying factors can be related to differences in system design and culture. We conduct a longitudinal comparison of the communities’ evolvement between two distinct stages, the initial days just after the site launch and one year later. We also observe that sub communities corresponding to different topics differ in their ability to sustain users. All results reveal the complexity and diversity in users’ engagement to a site and design implications are discussed.

JF - International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM’10) UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Social Regulation in an Online Game: Uncovering the Problematics of Code T2 - Proceedings of the 16th ACM international conference on Supporting group work (GROUP’10) Y1 - 2010 A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Jack Muramatsu A1 - McDonald, David W. KW - code KW - ethnography KW - games KW - online communities KW - police KW - social computing KW - social control KW - social interaction KW - social life KW - social regulation KW - socio-technical design KW - software infrastructure KW - user study KW - virtual communities AB -

More and more interaction is becoming code-based. Indeed, in online worlds, it is all there is. If software is providing a new basis for social interaction, then changing the infrastructure of interaction may necessarily change social interaction in important ways. As such, it is critical to understand the implications of code - we want to know what the use of code means for socio-technical design. In this paper, based on an ethnographic study of an online game, we examine social regulation in an online game world as a case study of socio-technical design using code. We wanted to know how changing interaction based in code conditioned use in our site. We found that code changed social regulation in three specific ways. First, code made some user actions that were socially unwanted to be immediately visible. Second, code could prevent some actions from occurring or punish users immediately. Finally, software was not able to see all action. Some user actions were too nuanced or subtle for code to catch; others were too ambiguous to place into code. Following Agre, we argue i that a "grammar of action" resulting from the use of code limits the kinds of behaviors that can be seen and dealt with. These findings suggest that there is more than just a gap between the social world and technical capabilities. There are new possibilities, tradeoffs, and limitations that must be considered in socio-technical design, and all come simultaneously.

JF - Proceedings of the 16th ACM international conference on Supporting group work (GROUP’10) SN - 978-1-4503-0387-3 UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Contribution, Commercialization & Audience: Understanding Participation in an Online Creative Community T2 - ACM Group 2009 Y1 - 2009 A1 - Eric Cook A1 - Stephanie D. Teasley A1 - Mark S. Ackerman KW - amateurs KW - audiences KW - commercialization KW - community of practice KW - creativity KW - learning KW - online communities KW - online community KW - professionals KW - social computing KW - user-generated content AB -

This paper presents a qualitative study of attitudes towards participation and contribution in an online creative community. The setting of the work is an online community of practice focused on the use and development of a user-customizable music software package called Reaktor. Findings from the study highlight four emergent topics in the discourse related to user contributions to the community: contribution assessment, support for learning, perceptions of audience and tensions about commercialization. Our analysis of these topics frames discussion about the value and challenges of attending to amateur and professional users in online creative communities.

JF - ACM Group 2009 UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Questions in, Knowledge iN? A study of Naver’s Question Answering Community T2 - ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’09) Y1 - 2009 A1 - Kevin K. Nam A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Lada A. Adamic KW - collective help KW - expertise finding KW - information access KW - online communities KW - Q&A communities KW - QA KW - question-answering KW - social computing AB -

Large general-purposed community question-answering sites are becoming popular as a new venue for generating knowledge and helping users in their information needs. In this paper we analyze the characteristics of knowledge generation and user participation behavior in the largest question-answering online community in South Korea, Naver Knowledge-iN. We collected and analyzed over 2.6 million question/answer pairs from fifteen categories between 2002 and 2007, and have interviewed twenty six users to gain insights into their motivations,roles, usage and expertise. We find altruism, learning, and competency are frequent motivations for top answerers to participate, but that participation is often highly intermittent. Using a simple measure of user performance, we find that higher levels of participation correlate with better performance. We also observe that users are motivated in part through a point system to build a comprehensive knowledge database. These and other insights have significant implications for future knowledge generating online communities.

JF - ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’09) UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Competing to Share Expertise: The Taskcn Knowledge Sharing Community. T2 - ICWSM Y1 - 2008 A1 - Jiang Yang A1 - Lada A. Adamic A1 - Mark S. Ackerman KW - competitions KW - e-commerce KW - e-communities KW - marketplaces KW - online communities KW - participation structures AB -

"Witkeys" are websites in China that form a rapidly growing web-based knowledge market. A user who posts a task also offers a small fee, and many other users submit their answers to compete. The Witkey sites fall in-between aspects of the now-defunct Google Answers (vetted experts answer questions for a fee) and Yahoo Answers (anyone can answer or ask a question). As such, these sites promise new possibilities for knowledge-sharing online communities, perhaps fostering the freelance marketplace of the future. In this paper, we investigate one of the biggest Witkey websites in China, Taskcn.com. In particular, we apply social network prestige measures to a novel construction of user and task networks based on competitive outcomes to discover the underlying properties of both users and tasks. Our results demonstrate the power of this approach: Our analysis allows us to infer relative expertise of the users and provides an understanding of the participation structure in Taskcn. The results suggest challenges and opportunities for this kind of knowledge sharing medium.

JF - ICWSM UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Crowdsourcing and Knowledge Sharing: Strategic User Behavior on Taskcn T2 - Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce Y1 - 2008 A1 - Jiang Yang A1 - Lada A. Adamic A1 - Mark S. Ackerman KW - contests KW - crowdsourcing KW - e-commerce KW - knowledge market KW - learning KW - online communities KW - question-answer sites KW - virtual communities KW - witkey AB -

Witkeys are a thriving type of web-based knowledge sharing market in China, supporting a form of crowdsourcing. In a Witkey site, users offer a small award for a solution to a task, and other users compete to have their solution selected.

In this paper, we examine the behavior of users on one of the biggest Witkey websites in China, Taskcn.com. On Taskcn, we observed several characteristics in users' activity over time. Most users become inactive after only a few submissions. Others keep attempting tasks. Over time, users tend to select tasks where they are competing against fewer opponents to increase their chances of winning. They will also, perhaps counterproductively, select tasks with higher expected rewards. Yet, on average, they do not increase their chances of winning, and in some categories of tasks, their chances actually decrease. This does not paint the full picture, however, because there is a very small core of successful users who manage not only to win multiple tasks, but to increase their win-to-submission ratio over time. This core group proposes nearly 20% of the winning solutions on the site. The patterns we observe on Taskcn, we believe, hold clues to the future of crowdsourcing and freelance marketplaces, and raise interesting design implications for such sites.

JF - Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce PB - ACM CY - New York, NY, USA SN - 978-1-60558-169-9 UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Knowledge Sharing and Yahoo Answers: Everyone Knows Something T2 - Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on World Wide Web Y1 - 2008 A1 - Lada A. Adamic A1 - Zhang, Jun A1 - Bakshy, Eytan A1 - Mark S. Ackerman KW - expertise finding KW - expertise sharing KW - help seeking KW - knowledge sharing KW - online communities KW - Q&A communities KW - QA communities KW - question answering KW - social network analysis AB -

Yahoo Answers (YA) is a large and diverse question-answer forum, acting not only as a medium for sharing technical knowledge, but as a place where one can seek advice, gather opinions, and satisfy one's curiosity about a countless number of things. In this paper, we seek to understand YA's knowledge sharing and activity. We analyze the forum categories and cluster them according to content characteristics and patterns of interaction among the users. While interactions in some categories resemble expertise sharing forums, others incorporate discussion, everyday advice, and support. With such a diversity of categories in which one can participate, we find that some users focus narrowly on specific topics, while others participate across categories. This not only allows us to map related categories, but to characterize the entropy of the users' interests. We find that lower entropy correlates with receiving higher answer ratings, but only for categories where factual expertise is primarily sought after. We combine both user attributes and answer characteristics to predict, within a given category, whether a particular answer will be chosen as the best answer by the asker.

JF - Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on World Wide Web UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Arkose: Reusing Informal Information in Online Communities T2 - ACM Group 2007 Conference Y1 - 2007 A1 - Kevin K. Nam A1 - Mark S. Ackerman KW - Arkose KW - collaborative distillation KW - collective help applications KW - community knowledge KW - design rationale KW - iDiag KW - incremental formalization KW - information access KW - information distillation KW - information organization KW - information reuse KW - knowledge communities KW - knowledge management KW - online communities AB -

Online discussions such as a large-scale community brainstorming often end up with an unorganized bramble of ideas and topics that are difficult to reuse. A process of distillation is needed to boil down a large information space into information that is concise and organized. We take a system-augmented approach to the problem by creating a set of tools with which human editors can collaboratively distill a large amount of informal information.

Two design principles, which we will define as incremental diagenesis and incremental summarization, help editors flexibly distill the informal information. Our system, Arkose, is built as a demonstration of these principles, providing the necessary tools for distillation. These tools include a number of visualization and information retrieval mechanisms, as well as an authoring tool and a navigator for the information space. They support a gradual increase in the order and reusability of the information space and allow various levels of intermediate states of a distillation.

JF - ACM Group 2007 Conference UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - CommunityNetSimulator: Using simulations to study online community networks T2 - Communities and Technologies 2007 Y1 - 2007 A1 - Zhang, Jun A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Lada A. Adamic KW - community dynamics KW - community strucure KW - incentive structures KW - online communities KW - Q&A communities KW - QA communities KW - reward structures KW - simulation AB -

Help-seeking communities have been playing an increasingly critical role the way people seek and share information online, forming the basis for knowledge dissemination and accumulation. Consider:

❑ About.com, a popular help site (http://about.com), boasts 30 million distinct users each month

❑ Knowledge-iN, a Korean site (http://kin.naver.com/), has accumulated 1.5 million question and answers.

Many additional sites exist from online stock trading discussions to medicaladvice communities. These range from simple text-based newsgroups to intricate immersive virtual reality multi-user worlds. Unfortunately, the very size of these communities may impede an individual’s ability to find relevant answers or advice. Which replies were written by experts and which by novices? As these help-seeking communities are also often primitive technically, they often cannot help the user distinguish between e.g. expert and novice advice. We would therefore like to find mechanisms to augment their functionality and social life. Research is proceeding to make use of the available structure in online communities to design new systems and  algorithms (e.g., [4], [10]). These are largely focused on social network characteristics of these communities.

However, differing network structures and dynamics will affect possible algorithms that attempt to make use of these networks, but little is known of these impacts.

Accordingly, we developed a CommunityNetSimulator (CNS), a simulator that combines various network models, as well as various new social network analysis techniques that are useful to study online community (or virtual organization) network formation and dynamics.

JF - Communities and Technologies 2007 PB - Springer UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Expertise networks in online communities: structure and algorithms T2 - Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web (WWW'07) Y1 - 2007 A1 - Zhang, Jun A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Lada A. Adamic KW - expert locators KW - expertise finding KW - help seeking KW - online communities KW - simulation KW - social network analysis AB -

Web-based communities have become important places for people to seek and share expertise. We find that networks in these communities typically differ in their topology from other online networks such as the World Wide Web. Systems targeted to augment web-based communities by automatically identifying users with expertise, for example, need to adapt to the underlying interaction dynamics. In this study, we analyze the Java Forum, a large online help-seeking community, using social network analysis methods. We test a set of network-based ranking algorithms, including PageRank and HITS, on this large size social network in order to identify users with high expertise. We then use simulations to identify a small number of simple simulation rules governing the question-answer dynamic in the network. These simple rules not only replicate the structural characteristics and algorithm performance on the empirically observed Java Forum, but also allow us to evaluate how other algorithms may perform in communities with different characteristics. We believe this approach will be fruitful for practical algorithm design and implementation for online expertise-sharing communities.
 

JF - Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web (WWW'07) PB - ACM UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Virtual community maintenance with a collaborative repository T2 - Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology Annual Meeting (ASIST'07) Y1 - 2007 A1 - Hansen, Derek L A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Resnick, Paul J A1 - Munson, Sean KW - answer repository KW - expertise sharing KW - knowledge distillation KW - online communities KW - Q&A communities KW - QA AB -

Virtual communities, like all communities, require ongoing community maintenance activities. This paper presents an empirical study examining how a wiki repository was used to help overcome some of the community maintenance challenges common to help-based email list discussions. Specifically, we found that inclusion of off-topic but related content on the wiki enabled list members to keep the discussion on-topic while still addressing the needs of members. Offloading of repetitive and potentially contentious “holy war” debates to the wiki encouraged list members to summarize their arguments into a meaningful information product. The community's use of the wiki in helping answer frequently asked questions helped attract new members and helped them gain the knowledge they needed to comfortably contribute to the email list. It also helped active participants answer questions more efficiently and effectively by supporting the reuse of information. Finally, the wiki supported peripheral participation by new and former members. This study demonstrates that the architecture of information collections and information flows in an online community has a significant impact on the social processes related to community maintenance.

JF - Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology Annual Meeting (ASIST'07) UR - MISSING_URL_KEYWORDS ER - TY - BOOK T1 - Social regulation of online multiplayer games Y1 - 2004 A1 - Jack Muramatsu KW - e-communities KW - game communities KW - game worlds KW - MUDs KW - online communities KW - social regulation AB -

Social regulation of user behavior is a key aspect of the community maintenance required to ensure the continued success and well-being of virtual worlds as “Third Places” (Oldenburg, 1989). Accordingly, this dissertation focuses on social regulation within two fantasy-based game MUDs (Multi-user Dungeons) which will be referred to as Illusion and Odyssey. Briefly, social regulation can be defined as “social arrangements employed to keep the behavior of some people in line with the expectations of others” (Hewitt and Hewitt, 1996). One key focus of the work is on providing an ethnographic account of the work performed by the games' administrators, immortals, in order to regulate player behavior. Immortals were observed to use both situated and typified reasoning in order to evaluate situations in a tractable and manageable manner. Such evaluation differs between virtual and physical spaces with respect to both the fluidity of identity and the visibility of information cues.

The second key focus of this work is on the role of software code in regulating behavior. On the two studied systems, code is not merely used as a passive tool by the immortals in the form of specialized commands to monitor player behavior and issue punishments but it also plays a much more active, autonomous role. Both systems utilize specialized software routines that automatically enforce restrictions on behavior that were previously enforced by the immortals. Such code serves as the active agent of regulation by continuously monitoring behavior within the game world and taking regulatory action accordingly. The analysis of the use of coded rules for regulation focuses on differences in the ways in which immortals and coded rules perform regulation. These differences rest primarily in the range and type of information cues used; code was observed to use a narrow set of cues, while immortals considered a much wider set of cues including issues of intent and extenuating circumstances.

In summary, this dissertation presents a detailed account of the regulatory work performed directly by system administrators and by autonomous code so that virtual “third places” might continue to thrive and prosper.

PB - University of California, Irvine, PhD Thesis UR - Thesis ER - TY - CONF T1 - I-DIAG: from community discussion to knowledge distillation T2 - Communities and Technologies (C&T 2003) Y1 - 2003 A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Swenson, Anne A1 - Cotterill, Stephen A1 - DeMaagd, Kurtis KW - distillation KW - expertise sharing KW - forums KW - knowledge artifact KW - knowledge management KW - knowledge sharing KW - online communities AB -

I-DIAG is an attempt to understand how to take the collective discussions of a large group of people and distill the messages and documents into more succinct, durable knowledge. I-DIAG is a distributed environment that includes two separate applications, CyberForum and Consolidate. The goals of the project, the architecture of IDIAG, and the two applications are described. We focus on technical mechanisms to augment social maintenance and social regulation in the system.

JF - Communities and Technologies (C&T 2003) UR - Complete ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Computing, social activity, and entertainment: A field study of a game MUD JF - Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) Y1 - 1998 A1 - Muramatsu, Jack A1 - Ackerman, Mark S KW - combat MUDs KW - entertainment KW - games KW - MUDs KW - online communities KW - participant-observation KW - play KW - social worlds KW - system design AB -

Are game and entertainment systems different than work-oriented systems? What drives the user's experience in a collaborative game? To answer these questions, we performed a participant-observation study of a combat MUD, a game similar to Dungeons and Dragons. Our interest is in how this social world is arranged and managed (rather than, for example, in how participants form or display individual identities). The study explores the social arrangements and activities that give meaning and structure to the participants. We found that conflict and cooperation were the dominant social activities on this MUD, much more so than sociability. The game's management played a critical function in maintaining and promoting these activities. Moreover, novelty and entertainment were important for the design of both the system features and the sociality itself.

VL - 7 UR - Complete ER -